This may or may not matter to you depending on the level of craftiness you use on your AdWords accounts, but if you have been using different display and destination URLs on your ads, you’re going to have to rethink your strategy.

According to Barry Schwartz (hi Barry!), Google has decided to even the playing field for advertisers by tightening the destination and display URLs policies for AdWords advertisement. The good news is that this mainly has to do with redirecting and sending traffic to other sites, and not (as far as I understand) using display URLs that don’t perfectly match the destination URL.

For example, if we want to send traffic to our auto insurance landing page, which has a destination URL of https://www.insureme.com/landing.aspx?Type=auto, we can still use a cleaner display URL like www.InsureMe.com or InsureMe.com/Auto.

On the other hand, if we wanted to use a different site’s URL as the display, like www.InsureMeBlog.com, but we sent the click to a page on www.InsureMeBlog.com that redirects to www.InsureMe.com, that would not be acceptable. Also, we couldn’t send traffic to another URL if it had identical content to www.InsureMe.com, and we can’t promote InsureMe in the ad and then send traffic to a URL different from www.InsureMe.com.

I have a feeling this may be a reaction to some of the wild AdWords tactics that were pointed out on the Shoemoney blog recently – and it is unclear whether there will be algorithmic or manual enforcement of this policy.

From what I understand the changes will take place in August of this year, so if you’ve been getting creative with your display and destination URLs, it might be time to start coming up with a new plan.