Anyone looking for "La Roche College" on the Internet search engine Google recently was liable to find a link suggesting that students can get a degree entirely online.

		Graphic: College confusion

In fact, La Roche offers no such degrees. And clicking on the link took visitors not to the Web site of the Catholic campus in McCandless but to another site promoting a for-profit school, the University of Phoenix.

Someone looking for Geneva College on Google would have found a similar link to a Phoenix ad. So would those searching for Waynesburg College, Westminster College, St. Vincent College and other schools in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Ohio.

These "sponsored links," as Google and various search engines call them, are paid advertisements, similar to others posted widely on the Internet by marketers peddling everything from gourmet steak burgers to custom-built yachts. But some college officials are chafing as they learn their school's name was planted on a link that steered individuals to a competitor.

College marketing wars are hardly new, but they have grown more complex in the rough-and-tumble world of the Internet. And it's causing friction in a state whose aging population makes the competition to recruit college students especially pitched.

Phoenix officials say they do not condone the ads' use and, in fact, those ads disappeared from Google after the Post-Gazette made inquiries with the university, the search engine based in California and some of the affected colleges 10 days ago.

But even after the Phoenix ads were gone, other commercial sites were giving colleges fits. For example, links that used lower-case letters but were otherwise identical to campus names -- like "la roche college" and "Bucknell university" -- continued to steer visitors toward a site with an address www.fast-degrees.com.

Those links were gone as of Thursday, a day after La Roche's general counsel sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google complaining of a trademark violation. But a sponsored link to yet another commercial site popped up on Friday bearing La Roche's name, prompting yet another review by campus officials. And yesterday the link to fast-degrees reappeared.

Some colleges in Pennsylvania contend the problem pertaining to Phoenix is a recurring one.

Geneva says its school name appeared almost three years ago on a link to a Phoenix ad that was removed after complaints were made. Juniata College officials said the same when contacted last week.

"It's the same issue, in my opinion, that goes with identity theft. It's misrepresentation," Geneva President Kenneth A. Smith said. "I find this pretty offensive."

Phoenix is the nation's largest private university, with roughly 250,000 students and locations in 39 states, including Pennsylvania. Terri Bishop, a senior vice president for public affairs, said the university wasn't being deceptive and that, in fact, it tried to do the right thing by pulling the ads.

"It's against our policy to purchase ads tied to other college names, and vendors who buy advertising for our university do know this," she said. "When we find out it happens, we put a stop to it."

Bishop said the process by which advertisers buy key words for sponsored links is a confusing and complex one and that real college names occasionally become linked to ads, either inadvertently or because a subcontractor strayed from Phoenix's ad-buying policy.

Owen Murray, Phoenix vice president for marketing, said he believed that college names come up because vendors opt on Google to repeat search terms for use as the headline of a sponsored link. He said altering that practice "would affect the searches and responses" vendors can offer Phoenix and other clients; but he said the matter would be raised with them.

Bishop said this surely happened to other schools buying sponsored links on search engines including Google, but that, "We're out there advertising a lot, and so our name, of course, gets connected to some of these issues."

"We don't have complete control over how the search engine process works," she said. "Nobody does."

Experts say it's hard to regulate search engine advertising, which in just five years has mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar industry. Marketers bid for the right to use various key words or terms enabling their ads to appear on screens along with regular results. In Google's case, they generally appear on the right side of the screen or elsewhere shaded in blue.

Often, these keywords or terms are purchased in automated transactions that aren't easy to monitor.

"For Google to police every one of its links is asking a lot, which isn't to say that they shouldn't" do it, said Jorgen Wouters, a consultant with Consumer Reports' WebWatch and an author of reports examining search engine advertising. "It's staggering. Everyone is trying to drive traffic to [his] site."

Michael Mayzel, a Google spokesman, declined to comment last week on the Phoenix ads or fast-degrees.com. He said Google did in general allow advertisers to use keywords pertaining to competitors, but that it would remove a link and forbid future use if someone holding a registered trademark lodged a complaint.

Colleges in Pennsylvania aren't the only ones whose names have appeared on these links. Searching for "Kenyon College" yielded a link to a Phoenix ad this month. A link to a Phoenix ad titled "College OF The Holy Cross" looked strikingly similar to the Jesuit campus by the same name in Worcester, Mass., except for the unnecessary capitalization of the words "Of" and "The" in the name.

"I'm not happy with it," Holy Cross spokeswoman Ellen Ryder said when shown the link.

Both links have since been removed.

Robert Cavelier, an ethicist at Carnegie Mellon University, said many people nowadays had enough Internet savvy to know the difference between an official site and advertising. Still, he said the ads do create misleading impressions and suggest an emerging problem.

"You know about buyer beware," he said. "This is browser beware."

St. Vincent spokesman Don Orlando was not overly concerned last week about the sponsored link to a Phoenix ad bearing his school's name. "If young people are not bright enough to understand how the Web works, they probably would not be successful at Saint Vincent," he said.

But Don Francis, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Pennsylvania, said schools spent large sums of money to develop a brand and that it was wrong to create the impression of an affiliation or endorsement that does not exist. He said the links were unethical.

"When one clicks on La Roche College, our expectation would be you get to La Roche College and not some entirely different institution. It's deceptive," said Ken Service, a La Roche vice president, when shown a posting that carried his school's name.

Geneva's Smith said he realized that copyright and fair usage issues were sometimes blurry when they involve the Internet. But the name of his Christian campus in Beaver Falls is a registered trademark.

Jeff Schindel, the school's director of public relations, has been tracking these links and alerting his counterparts at schools. He said the damage already had been done.

"How many people logging onto any of these search engines, not just Google, were being taken away?"