The Government Shutdown is not bad for everyone.

These advertisers are getting some exposure because of the government shutdown. I knew it! I knew that if I went to Google to search for ‘Government Shutdown’ I would find advertisers there. Who can blame them? If they have content about the shutdown, they have a right to pay for it to be seen.

Interesting note: Google does not show ads on the first page of the SERPs. You have to go to page 2 in order to see the ads.
Look how chumps like this are benefiting from the exposure:

This PPC Display URL makes you think you are going to go to wikipedia.

Why do I call them chumps if I think it is okay for them to advertise on this keyword? Because the way they do it is Shady McGravy! Really, it is illegal. Have you ever heard of trademark infringement? This, in my opinion, has crossed the line. Look at that display URL! I spend all day on line, and I am familiar with URL structure, and even I didn’t notice that they weren’t the real Wikipedia. In fact, the reason I clicked their ad first was because I was very surprised to see Wikipedia advertising there. I thought maybe some of the Wiki trolls that try to re-write reality (aka deceive) were paying to advertise on this SERP so that their lies could be seen before a moderator deletes their untruthful wiki entry. Didn’t know that happens? Yep. It does. All the time. And yes, people get paid to monitor and enter stuff in Wikipedia.

Here is the dirt bag’s (aka Wikipedia Advanced) landing page:

Here is a screenshot of the landing page on Wikipedia Advanced

Actually, after some more thought into this, I think what may be happening is these guys can’t advertise the wikipedia page themselves so they instead advertise the scraped wiki page on this advanc.io URL so they can spread their on-the-fly encyclopedia.

Dear Wikipedians, an encyclopedia is for providing sourced FACTS from history, not up to the minute news updates from biased (that you consider credible) news sources.

Wow! I am RANTY today!

Well, let me end my rant with one more display url fraud:

Another example where you might think you are going to go to Google when you click on this ad. Trademark infringement for sure.

What do you PPC people think? Is this display url fraud or is it harmless? Do you think the average joe would know that this isn’t a true Google URL? Let your voice be heard in the comments.