Since Google launched Ad Sitelinks back in November 2009, we are now seeing all kind of weird and wonderful symbols in competitor adtexts across several industries, including arrows, hearts, diamonds and starts etc. this can be achieved by manipulating HTML within the sitelinks section of the campaign settings tab.
Please see a small selection of my favourites below;
After reading a few blogs and several discussion on twitter later I decided to contact our Google account manager regarding Google’s view on using sitelink symbols in our ads.
Google stated that symbols in sitelinks are not permitted and any advertisers using these will have their ads disapproved. There was also talk of accounts using these symbols being suspended, however i don not have any evidence to support this.
Despite bringing a little more life to the SERP’s, symbols in sitelinks will be short lived until google finally crack down on this un-permitted use of adtexts.
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The icons are a pretty cool way of enticing users to clicking the sitelink. It’s definitely unfair though and up there with display a favicon by the side of the link in the SERPs. I can’t remember which search engine does it, but either way it was definitely enticement.