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Posted by David Naffziger in ACPA, PPC, UDRP, cybersquatting, domains, poaching, typosquatting
13 Nov
My slides from the Domains and Trademark Issues panel at PubCon are here. I went through a number of tools that website owners can use to find abuse in domains and PPC.
Clarke Walton provided an overview of trademark law and a good case study involving pubcon.com Deborah Wilcox profiled the default judgment against Punch-Clock.com [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, PoachMark, adwords, ysm
01 Oct
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 [...]
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 it’s hardly [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in Affiliate Tactics, PPC, PoachMark
11 Jul
Reverse IP geo-targeting is one of the most commonly used techniques by trademark infringing affiliates. They hide themselves from occaisional monitoring by showing their ads to every geography except the geography where they believe the brand-holder is monitoring from.
For example, Gap’s corporate headquarters is located in San Francisco. A Gap affiliate could target their ads [...]
John Gartner has a good piece in Revenue magazine about trademark poaching, correctly identifying it as an up and coming challenge for affiliate marketers.
Trademark poaching is attractive because of the low barrier to entry. For just the price of a PPC ad, publishers can quickly generate handsome commissions without the usual affiliate administration overhead, and [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords
03 Jun
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 [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in Affiliate Tactics, BrandVerity, PPC, PoachMark
28 May
Referrer Laundering is a technique frequently used by ill-intentioned websites to redirect traffic on to a second party, while masking the actual origin of the traffic. We see it frequently in affiliate search engine advertising – the user experience typically looks like this:
User searches for “SampleStore”
User clicks search ad for SampleStore.com
The user is taken [...]
It looks like the addition of geolabels wasn’t the only change made to Yahoo’s search results. They’ve now moved the Paypal checkout cart from alongside the title to below the ad. It looks like these changes have been in place for at least a week, although they may have been live longer.
Before:
After:
I wasn’t [...]
With a tip of the hat to Google, Yahoo has added the geography of geo-targeted search ads below the ad text.
For example, a search for ‘lawyers’ from our office in Seattle returns this result:
Prior to this, the ads wouldn’t state the geography at all. I haven’t seen data on this, but I would expect geotargeted [...]
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, [...]