Blocking your Competition in AdWords

I decided to go ahead and block my competitors from viewing my ads. First off, what does this really mean. The nuts and bolts are that anytime a person types in a word into the Google Search engine, they could possibly see an advertisement for your company, if you have purchased that phrase or term (keyword). If I wanted to be mean, I would click on the ads of my competitors, this is known as a form of "click fraud". I am not suggesting that you go out and start racking up the clicks, in-fact it would be harmful, Google and others have very good systems in place to catch it

Which doesn't stop the "occasional" click from your competitors.

Google does a pretty good job offering a tool in the AdWords application. If you navigate to your AdWords account you can select the "Tools", from there select the "IP Exclusion". Google will allow you to block up to 20 IP addresses, this includes wildcard ranges. So getting started, let us say that Yahoo! is my competition (it's not).

The first thing I would do is to find the IP range of the PICs, the people in charge. Knowing what I know about Yahoo!, they have a Mountainview/San Jose office and (I think it's still there) an Office somewhere in Dallas. Let's find out....this is where you need to know how to use the old whois tool. Whois is a query tool telling you who an IP has been registered to. The main database you want to query is ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, they will more than likely tell you who has what IP. So how do you find out the IP if you don't know it? Well you will need to do an IP lookup, this can be done sometimes by a straight ping, traceroute, or nslookup.

Now do not just go pinging away at the web address, that may not get you what you need to know! I almost never use the www.foobar.com web address simply because it doesn't always mean what you think it means.

Webservers are not always located at the corporate offices, where the marketing department is probably located! I tend to look an office by mail server, which is also not always at the corporate office, but is more often than not. So lets find Yahoo's corporate office by IP address (if we can). mail.yahoo.com shows up with an IP of 209.191.92.114. Now all I need to do is find that IP in the world. SEOMOZ has a pretty little AJAX tool which can tell us where the IP is geographically located (most of the time).

209.191.92.114 shows up in San Jose, off highway 82. This sounds right, now let's do a whois on that IP. The address comes up in Sunnyvale, not San Jose, but for my purposes it's close enough. Now lets look at the whois:

Search results for: 209.191.92.114
OrgName: Yahoo!

OrgID:      YAOO
Address:    701 First Ave
City:       Sunnyvale
StateProv:  CA
PostalCode: 94089
Country:    US
NetRange:   209.191.64.0 - 209.191.127.255
CIDR:       209.191.64.0/18
NetName:    A-YAHOO-US3
NetHandle:  NET-209-191-64-0-1
Parent:     NET-209-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS2.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS3.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS4.YAHOO.COM
NameServer: NS5.YAHOO.COM
Comment:   
RegDate:    2005-05-20
Updated:    2005-07-21
RAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
RAbuseName:   Network Abuse
RAbusePhone:  +1-408-349-3300
RAbuseEmail:  network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgAbuseHandle: NETWO857-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Network Abuse
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-408-349-3300
OrgAbuseEmail:  network-abuse@cc.yahoo-inc.com
OrgTechHandle: NA258-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Netblock Admin
OrgTechPhone:  +1-408-349-3300
OrgTechEmail:  netblockadmin@yahoo-inc.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-09-20 19:10

The part we are interested in for blocking is:

NetRange:   209.191.64.0 - 209.191.127.255 

which is ALOT of addresses, but you could enter up to 20 of these ranges in AdWords by entering them in the AdWords list as:
209.191.64.*
209.191.65.*
etc

That should do it....enjoy