A bookseller posting on eBay noticed that a Sponsored Link at the top of Google search results advertising the official eBay website took people to Amazon instead of to eBay. An Amazon.com spokesperson told AuctionBytes on Monday it wasn't them but has not yet gotten back to us to confirm whether it could be an Amazon.com affiliate. The ad linked to a page on Amazon.com featuring iPods for sale with the following URL, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/13660271/ref=bdst-ipod, which does not appear to be an affiliate link.

eBay spokesperson Catherine England responded quickly to our inquiry. "We can't duplicate the situation you described. I can assure you that eBay's ad campaigns are focused on driving traffic to our own website."

A Google spokesperson emailed a response on Tuesday: "Google AdWords policy requires that the display URL in an AdWords ad must accurately reflect the URL of the landing page to which users are directed when clicking on the ad. We use a combination of automated and manual processes to detect violations of AdWords policy. As soon as we were made aware of the alleged eBay ad that directed users to Amazon, we canceled the ad. For more information on our AdWords policy, please visit: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=guidelines.cs&topic=9271&subtopic=9280"

We asked Google whether it was able to detect who was running the ad. We also wanted to know if the perpetrator used a new technique to overcome the detection processes, and if so, whether Google created a method to prevent this from happening again in the future. The Google spokesperson said she had no additional information at this point, but would let us know if that changed.

Here's a conversation about the issue on the AuctionBytes Blog:
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2007/12/1197297402.html#comments