Tuesday, January 27, 2009

He said, she said using Google ads part II

Yesterday I posted about the fight between online hotel seller Asiativ and meta-search player Hotelscombined being played out on through paid search war of words. Via a comment on that post I looked at the Google results for the search Asiativ. Check out the results in this screenshot

In case you can't read it, the top paid search result says
Please Read
www.Asiativ.com Clarification on Negative Ad Done By Hotels Combined
and the second one says
Do not book with AsiaTiv
www.HotelsCombined.com Fraud alert : Asiativ.com Read customer reviews first
Again I am just passing on their words. I have none of the background here so cannot comment on either of the views from the Asiativ or HotelsCombined. But what the hell is Google doing allowing these things to go on in their search results!

UPDATE - Google have stepped in (or a truce has been called). See shot below. Though there is now a good SEO battle as you can see from the seventh organic link on the search term Asiativ. If this is Google action then they have moved quicklyThe below shot is only fours hours after this post went live


7 comments:

shariel said...

Interesting fact!! Thanks for sharing....

Anonymous said...

Both companies should be ashamed of themselves for airing their disputes publically. The general consumer is only going to see two immature and unprofessional companies having a fist fight via Google Adwords.

If I was an investor or travel partner in either company, then I would be asking some serious questions about their corporate ethics

samdaams said...

Agree with previous commenter. Shame on them. To a customer this clearly looks too dodgy for words and you'd want to stay away from both. Bummer for their affiliates too...

JugglerX said...

I think its great!

Anonymous said...

Someone from Hotelscombined needs to try and deal with the negative publicity created from AsiaTiv. I just came accross a very negative blog post from one of their affliates. Its a shame as I do like the Hotelscombined service

http://www.secondcity.in/2009/02/01/hotels-combined-pty-ltd-turning-out-to-be-one-of-the-biggest-scams-of-travel-industry-publishers-denied-affiliate-payments-which-sums-up-to-thousands-of-dollars/

Anonymous said...

I've gone through the claims made by SecndCity.in on HotelsCombined issue and it has nothing to do with AsiaTiv issue. Even WikiTravel is talking about something fishy going on at HotelsCombined. No doubt it is one of the best travel meta search engine but until unless you are not treating your affiliates with respect, you bound to loose very quickly. A follow-up of their previous story looks very damaging. http://www.secondcity.in/2009/03/08/hotelscombined-scam-yury-shar/

beware said...

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