Let me ask you guys something. As an exercise, I purchased some keywords that have to do with trademark law for ads that promote The Trademark Blog.
I use MyBlogLog, which identifies URLs that readers clicked on to get to my site. One such URL is:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-4171260820145196&dt=1192178573625&lmt=1192178573&prev_fmts
=728x90_as&format=300x250_as&output=html&correlator=1192178572531&channel=5765682001&
url=http://www.wwe.com/divasearch/competitions/res
If you click on that URL you get a page that looks like this, displaying Google ads for watches, wrestling shows and ringtones. If you look at the string, you will see a bit of a url:
http://www.wwe.com/divasearch/competitions/res
which doesn’t resolve but
http://www.wwe.com/divasearch/competitions/rescue/
does resolve to the WWE site. You’ll notice that the page has no content conceivably related to trademark law (although the word ‘trademark’ does appear on the bottom of the page, as part of WWE’s trademark legend).
However you’ll note that there are no keyword ads on the page.
Various ‘Google syndication’ URLs containing bits of WWE pathnames have been showing up for several weeks now, as well as pathnames that I would characterize as resolving to splogs. None of these sites are trademark related and none seem to be running my ads.
And I’m skeptical that if my ads did appear on the WWE site, that anyone viewing the WWE Divasearch would click through to view The Trademark Blog.
Any theories as to why these strings are showing up in my referrer logs (and yes, I am being charged and no, Google has not provided an explanation to date)?