If you’re using display URLs in your ads that actually point clickers to a different URL, you’ll want to change those ads before April 1st, 2008. That’s when Google will be strictly enforcing their display URL policy.

We all know they’ve had this policy for some time but it appears that enough people have abused Google’s leniency on this rule (they aren’t lenient on many) enough to where it’s now going to be enforced.

Some questions regarding this enforcement can be found here, but I’m still wondering how they’re going to treat accurate display URLs that may have a “sub directory” which may not actually exist.

For example, let’s say I sell widgets…ha ha ha, don’t think I’m going to use that example, I hate widgets. But seriously, let’s say I’m Golfsmith and want to sell golfballs. I’ll run an ad with the display URL being Golfsmith.com/GolfBalls in order to get a higher quality score and possibly some more click throughs due to bolding.

The actual URL for golf balls on their site is “http://www.golfsmith.com/ps/browse.php?N=287458.” While this URL isn’t exactly what the display URL showed, it’s still very relevant as that’s the golf balls page.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how they go about enforcing this rule.

-Brian Renner