As I discovered today, Economist.com has an AdWords Campaign promoting its rss feed.

The Ad points to http://www.economist.com/index.html/rss/?sa_campaign=search_engines/ Google_Italy/eurfeb07/Content/kw=RSS_Feeds_General&GCID=C19402×008-RSSGen
… but the link is broken!

Here’s a screenshot of the page (you can click for a larger view) :

Page Not Found

Unfortunately the page you have requested on Economist.com does not exist.
If you have typed in this link, please recheck the URL.

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Visit our homepage

It’s nice to see how a PR 9 site is unable to promote itself… They’re spending thousands of dollars to drive traffic to a 404 not found page.

I contacted them from the form on their website, I wrote them the following email

Hi,Today I clicked an adsense ad promoting your rss feed, but I landed
on a 404 not found page.

The ad pointed to
http://www.economist.com/index.html/rss/?sa_campaign=search_engines/ Google_Italy/eurfeb07/Content/kw=RSS_Feeds_General&GCID=C19402×008-RSSGen

maybe you should check that url, because I think you’re wasting money
this way

regards

francesco mapelli
www.mapelli.info

they assigned me the Case number 1406338.

Let’s see what happens next, I’ll keep you informed .

Do you think they’ll fix this soon or they’ll keep on wasting money for months?