Well Google is in the business of selling ads anyway. Are you suggesting that they go bankrupt over your definition of spam.

I have ignored "...shop for James at Amazon.com", for years because I understand that ads pay the bills.(my name is James, by the way)

It is very clever the way you yourself are manipulating keywords by writing about Google Ads knowing you will get passionate responses from both sides of the issue that will fill this page with "relevant" content and raise your own page rankings with Google.

Everyone is manipulating keywords so don't fuss over the paid ads too much. We are all better off than we were ten years ago, wouldn't you agree?

I suspect it's only odd if you aren't the people typing in those terms. If you have a term that is only known by people that are very knowledgable about a subject, which suggests they know what they are looking for and are more easily converted into paying customers, it makes a lot of sense to advertise with that word, even if it means something different to people that wouldn't buy it.

For example, sizing is a mixture of glue and chalk that is added to paper to make it white and smooth. The only people likely to search for it are people that are very interested in paper. Some people looking for clothes might search on it, but someone that really wants to buy clothes is probably going to search on a different term. So sizing is very valuable for a highly targeted audience, and worthless to pretty much everyone else.

In your example for Scott, is there anything else someone would sell attached to that word? If not, then it makes perfect sense. If any given word has a product associated with it, no matter how obscure that product is, it's worth it to the seller to advertise with that word. In fact, the more obscure it is, probably the more valuable it is.

Ted, thanks for pointing that out -- it makes perfect sense.

But it's still curious to me -- what are the chances that someone looking for Karp access panels or Scott mortgage is going to search for those items with just those key words alone? The result, while targeted on the one hand, is quite odd-looking on the other hand as far as ad copy goes.

I would guess the results from such a keyword strategy requires prospective customers to have the same sophisticated understanding of how AdWords works in order grok the ads.

I don't question that this is state-of-the-art. It's just that the "art," being algorithm-driven, is capable of producing results that look odd to humans -- even if they do work.

This seems kind of dashed-off. Even looking at your screenshot, I can see that Karp is apparently the name of a type of access panel, which is exactly what the company which has the top spot is selling. People often search for items based on brand name, so that company is probably getting lots of highly targeted traffic.

As for scott, I believe it's the name of a type of mortgage.

If you want to get to know AdWords, I suggest you get an account and actually use the product-- those advertisers aren't spammers at all, they're people using highly targeted keywords to bring customers to their business. They know what they're doing, and they have hard numbers to back it up. "spamming" AdWords makes absolutely no sense in any context-- why on earth would anyone pay for random traffic when there is so much targeted traffic available?