There was a brief hullabaloo after the iPhone price drop where some strangle Google ads appeared when you search for “iphone price drop”.
> This is like salt in the wound for the early adopter while I was initially bummed by the price cut news, this makes it infuriating! I’m a big boy and made the choice to stand in line and have fun with the rest of the faithful on iPhone day. I can handle a price change or even a new product, but for the price to be cut so drastically so quickly and then to have it rubbed in my face like this by Apple is just wrong.
Today, Cory O’Brien over at Didn’t You Hear came clean and admitted to placing the ad allegedly from Apple. Which would have been fine if he didn’t try to pass the buck to the blogs who covered it for “misreporting” and failing to “fact check”:
> See how their address is apple.com/store, and mine was store.apple.com? Also, see where their ad is placed? That’s usually a pretty good clue about the source of an ad. Fortunately, some of the various blogs’ commenters picked up on the fact that this was an affiliate ad, and not one placed by Apple, and called it out as such. Unfortunately, many of the blogs themselves did not. Fact checking would have saved me quite a bit of worry in this situation, so my plea to the big boy blogs is this: Keep those journalistic integrities intact, and Check That Fact!
Of course, had Cory done a little more research, he would’ve realized his own “facts” are wrong.
Also, the yellow box that sometimes appears at the top of the page? It has nothing to do with the source of the ad.
> While there isn’t a way to ensure top placement, there are certainly some best practices that may well help your ads rise to the top. Really, there are no secrets: these are the same best practices that affect the positioning (or ranking) of your AdWords ads wherever they appear, and they also happen to be the same best practices we wrote about just a few days ago.
Never let the facts stop a badly planned joke.