Google has been in legal battles concerning disputes in their AdWords platform since way back in 2009. Several pay-per-click marketers filed a class-action law suit that claimed that Google was putting ads on pages that were known to be low performing, which resulted on a reduced ROI for the marketers. Specifically, Google would often display ads on error pages and parked domains. These types of pages are not and were not typically seen as targeted in the same way that the normal Google search results pages were.
In addition, some marketers claimed that having their ads displayed on error pages and parked domains could damage their brand. People seeing their brand ads displayed on these types of pages might mistakenly think that they were either spam or else that the company wasn’t doing well.
Google has requested that the Supreme Court hear the case, claiming that there is no way that restitution can be calculated in any type of across the board formula, which is what the class action suit wants. According to Google, some ads actually perform better on parked domains and error pages than they would on the SERPs.
Despite the request, the Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal. This means that at least as of now, the class-action status of this case will remain intact. While the case is far from over, this likely means that Google will have to negotiate some type of settlement with the plaintiffs in the case or else the lower court will determine what type of damages they are responsible for.
Google has long since changed their ad policies so marketers who use their services aren’t having the same issues.
