Google Sued For Quality Of Ads On AdSense for Domains

Google Sued For Selling Ads On Parked Domains from InformationWeek reports Google was slapped with a class action lawsuit over the AdSense for Domains product. In short, advertisers are upset with the quality of traffic driven through that program and feel that their money was taken from them without any return.

The suit was filed on Friday in a U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. The law firm, Schubert Jonckheer Kolbe & Kralowec, is based in San Francisco. The one suing is actually a lawyer, suing under Levitte International for his advertising campaign he ran from June 1, 2007 through August 18, 2007. The campaign received 202,528 impressions via the AdSense for Domains program. The campaign also was shown on the AdSense for Errors program, which received 1,009 impressions, 25 clicks, and zero conversions. The AdSense of Domains and AdSense for Errors traffic and impressions cost him $136.11.

Levitte hopes that other advertisers join his lawsuit. “We believe it’s a problem that affects all [Google’s] advertisers equally,” said Kimberly Kralowec, partner at the law firm representing Levitte.

It is important to note that in August 2007, when this lawyer’s campaign was still active, Google announced that they will be enabling a feature to allow advertisers to opt out of AdSense for Domains traffic. Google began beta testing this feature in November 2007.

In addition, the domain park (AdSense for Domains) is not new to getting Google in trouble. We reported it landed Google in a trademark case back in January 2007.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.