Google AdWords Campaign Circumvents Censorship in China
The CitizenLab blog has an account of bypassing China’s strict search engine censorship of Google.cn with Google AdWords. Seems that after setting up a China geotargeted AdWords account for Human Rights Watch, the blogger was able to have those ads served on Google.cn. Human Rights Watch‘s site is blocked in China and delisted from Google.cn’s index according to the CitizenLab blog.
My ad was being shown on the uncensored Chinese language Google, but not the censored Google.cn. Google checks what ads to deliver by location (determined by IP address) and the language setting of your browser. Despite both of these showing that my language was Chinese and my location was in China the ad did not properly appear.
Eventually, my ad began to be shown on Google.cn. While my ad does not appear every time the keywords are searched, it does periodically appear.
