Questionable search ads slip by Yahoo

Yahoo recently expanded the list of products that can’t be advertised on its search engine, but it appears the company could be more stringent in enforcing its ad rejection policies.

IDG News Service queried Yahoo’s search engine on Monday with obvious keywords clearly intended to trigger ads for products and services that violate the company’s search ad editorial guidelines. The experiment produced multiple ads that Yahoo apparently should have rejected.

Interestingly, it wasn’t only outside advertisers that managed to place inappropriate ads: Yahoo itself appeared to violate its own guidelines with at least one questionable ad from a company unit.

Upon reviewing the examples of possibly inappropriate ads submitted by IDG News Service, Yahoo said that not all violated its editorial guidelines. It declined to identify the infringing ones, but said it had removed them, as it does whenever it sees noncompliant ads.

“We evaluate our marketplace and advertising policies — including unacceptable content — on an ongoing basis. We also continually refine our review processes and procedures in an effort to serve the most appropriate and relevant ads to our users,” it said in an e-mailed statement. Yahoo’s ad screening process involves human reviewers and automated filters.

One that should have been easy to flag was an ad for Ephedra products from Yahoo’s Shopping comparison shopping engine. Ephedra products are listed by Yahoo Search Marketing as an example of products of questionable legality. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration banned the sale of Ephedra-containing dietary supplements.

Yet, a search on Monday triggered an ad titled “Best Ephedra Products” from Yahoo Shopping. The same keyword query from Monday failed to produce the ad on Wednesday, suggesting it may have been among the ones pulled.

The finding that Yahoo is accepting an undetermined number of ads that should be banned comes less than two weeks after the company announced it had expanded the list of products and services it won’t accept ads for to include cigarettes, academic essay-writing services, fake ID or fake diplomas, and firearms, ammunition, and fireworks.

IDG News Service also found an ad from a vendor apparently based in Hong Kong marketing an HIV home test kit, an apparent violation of Yahoo’s policy against such kits that haven’t been approved by the FDA. Figuring out which of these kits are FDA approved isn’t difficult: Only one such product has the FDA endorsement. This was another ad that Yahoo apparently removed.

Searching for “pyramid scheme” triggered multiple ads for so-called MLM (multilevel marketing) companies. These companies, which aren’t necessarily illegal, operate under a model of selling via distributors that are offered commissions not only for their sales but also for sales of people they recruit. These MLM companies are considered to be illegally operating pyramid schemes if most of their sales are made among distributors instead of to end consumers.

Why a legitimate MLM company would want its ads to appear whenever someone searches for “pyramid schemes” is highly suspicious. On Wednesday, the roster of MLM company ads triggered by the “pyramid scheme” keyword was gone, replaced instead with ads from vendors that sell products related to this topic, such as books from Amazon.com.

Yahoo’s guidelines also forbid ads for products designed to descramble cable and satellite signals to get such services for free, yet on Monday a search for “cable descramblers” called up an ad blatantly promoting “Cable Pirate Boxes.” That ad also seems to have been removed.

IDG News Service also found ads on Monday for cigarettes, designer product knock-offs, police radar detectors and rifle ammunition, all of them from categories banned by Yahoo’s guidelines.