Update: This isn’t new.  Barry Schwartz from SearchEngineLand first noticed this in August: http://searchengineland.com/google-checkout-steps-up-promotion-through-adwords-14635.php We did suddenly see a rash of these on Monday, so perhaps the program was expanded. — Google has consistently been increasing the visual differentiation of the badges in AdWords and are testing new badges with coupons prominently displayed. Here is [...]

Updated May 5:Google has made several changes in its trademark policies. Please visit our summary of Search Engine Trademark Policies for the current policies of the search engines. We work with several of our clients to enforce their trademark rights on Yahoo, Google and Live and felt a summary of our experiences would be useful [...]

Jeremy Shoemaker pointed out this thread on Digital Point where an affiliate manager requested access to an affiliate’s AdWords account. The affiliate manager was trying to determine if the affiliate had violated the keyword policies of the merchant.  Obviously, there is a lot of sensitive data in there and affiliates should be extremely reluctant to [...]

Eric Goldman points to a recent ruling that declared purchasing an ad based on a keyword (a practice currently allowed by Google) to be a use in commerce. Eric also points out that there has been split rulings on whether this constitutes a use in commerce: The court is right about the majority vote, but [...]

While most lawsuits involving trademarks and search engine advertising identify the search companies as defendants, CNET recently covered a lawsuit between two competitors that sell identity theft protection services.  Namesafe, sued Lifelock in the federal district court of Tennessee for trademark infringement and is seeking damages, attorney’s fees and an injunction against Lifelock. The ads [...]

The WSJ published an article today about trademark ‘piggybacking’ in Google’s search advertising, and the growing resentment of the practice by Google’s advertisers. They use the term ‘piggybacking’ to refer to the use of: major players’ brand names, slogans or other trademarked words in the text of search ads to lure Web surfers to their [...]

Stephen Heise (via SearchEngineLand) identifies some advertisers that are cloaking their AdWords URLs: spammers create ads that display your URL but redirect to a spam site of their choosing, cloaking the redirect so Google can’t tell what’s going on. This is actually a close relative of Referrer Laundering and uses many of the same techniques. [...]

Search Engine Roundtable reports that some Adwords advertisers have begun to see Google enforcing their new display url policy. The report is based on a WebmasterWorld thread in which two advertisers report enforcement. While this is encouraging, we haven’t seen this in any of the campaigns that we monitor. Google rarely makes sweeping changes, so [...]

Thomas O’Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case.  The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com). The case was won by default (the defendant didn’t appear). The defendant was found to have infringed the registered punchclock mark in violation of 15 U.S.C. 1114(1)(a) and [...]

Google recently announced that while it will jettison Performics search marketing division, it will keep the Performics affiliate network. We’ve found it difficult to definitively distinguish merchant search marketing campaigns run by Performics from ads run by Performics affiliates so this move should clearly separate the two link structures over time. Here’s the email from [...]