[32032141]

This is an explicit tool in adwords, believe it or not.

The feature is intended so that you can have a link "to" http://trackersRus.com/ which forwards to http://ebay.com/, without the user seeing that bit of ugly.

It's been used in campaigns for years, I've reported probably hundreds of these distributing malware.

[arbuge]

It appears here that the redirection to the ebay.com destination url is not happening and that the user ends up on a different domain.

That kind of situation is usually detected when ads are entered into the Google Ads* platform for review, with ads then rejected for "destination url mismatch". One thing checked is that the final destination url after all redirects matches what is specified in the ad's final url field.

I suspect the scammers here are somehow faking the destination url for Google's bot checker to pass the Google checks and then serving different destination urls to users who they believe are not Google bots.

* Google Ads is now the correct branded name. No longer called AdWords as in the title.

[amluto]

Google's approach here seems totally wrong. The destination URL should be, exactly, the link as shown. If someone wants to track clicks using a third-party tracker, Google should offer an API for that which does not give the third-party tracker any ability to control the destination -- they have plenty of market power to impose this and, heck, they could even charge a small premium.

Most browsers support a lovely feature where the a tag has a ping attribute, which is intended for more or less this use case.

[nullwasamistake]

Wow it seems trivial to trick Google's bots with these links. Have the page redirect until ad is approved, profit?

I'm sure it's easy to find their bot IP's too. Just make a bunch of terrible ads that nobody will click and see who visits the url.

Google needs to abolish this link policy, I don't see how it's enforceable

[gnud]

I've had this problem on Facebook. I've reported some ads for various (relatively benign) scams for herbals and the like, that use a famous newspaper as 'their url', when they have nothing to do with it.

Facebook closed my report as 'not against ad policy'.

Anyway, this is actually easily fixed without losing tracking/campaign flexibility, by requiring ad orders to be signed by a certificate valid for the target domain, if the URL is different from the displayed one.

[anon4242]

> Facebook closed my report as 'not against ad policy'.

Heh, makes you wonder, what's the ad policy? Sounds like: 'They pay us money, so must be legit?'

[sambe]

If Google enforced that hosts/domains matched, could you not redirect from your own host to the tracking provider (and them back to you)?

[jstanley]

Yes, but most of the people buying ads are not technically competent enough to make this happen.

Google's solution ensures that the marketing people get what they want without the technical people standing in the way.

[stingraycharles]

Wouldn’t a simple solution to this problem be to prove ownership of the domain you want displayed? Why is this not done yet, this is almost standard practice nowadays for many types of services.

[soared]

A lot of companies send ads to amazon.com rather then their own web site.

[__jal]

Yep. This is why you never click on ads, period.

[jordansmithnz]

I wonder why Google doesn’t follow the redirect, and ensure the followed link matches the displayed link?

I get that there’s workarounds like changing the redirect after Google checks it, but there’s solutions to this too (like running checks every so often to ensure the link redirects to the same domain).

[boomlinde]

Possibly the checks are identifiable by User-agent, Referer, client address, timing etc.

For this purpose there's a lot of room for false positives. It doesn't matter if some actual users actually get redirected to ebay.

[sangnoir]

Online ad campaigns depend on redirects to reconcile clicks and analytics. It is dumb, but if you want to get customers/make money in the ad space, you have to support this.