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Late Thursday, Google announced the largest changes to their US AdWords policy in some time. Previously, trademark owners could prevent anyone from using their trademarks in their ad copy. Now, resellers and information sites may utilize the trademarked terms in their ad copy.
This shift will likely be a boon for shopping comparison sites, [...]
Google announced a change yesterday to its AdWords trademark policy in 190 countries, bringing that policy in line with its policies for the US, CA, UK & IE.
Trademark Bidders (New Countries that Google will now allow TradeMark Bidding in)
The full list of 190 countries affected can be found in Google’s announcement:
Countries like Japan, South Africa, [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, affiliate marketing, poaching
06 Apr
Amazon sent an email to all its affiliates this morning announcing a change in its paid search policy for affiliates – Affiliates will no longer be allowed to direct link to Amazon.
The issue of whether search affiliates add to the bottom line is a hotly debated one in affiliate marketing. In our opinion, the [...]
Those that have been following the various legal wranglings over search ads and trademarks recognize that a key issue is whether search ads classify as a ‘use in commerce’. This distinction is important for trademark holders – very few trademark protections apply unless the trademark is ‘used in commerce’. I’m surprised that there has ever [...]
Posted by David Naffziger in meta tags, poaching, typosquatting
11 Mar
I spoke on a great panel on brand and reputation management. The bulk of the content was focused on personal reputation management, however it was very high quality.
Lisa Barone, of Outspoken Media, is a *very* quick typist and has great notes on the recently launched Outspoken Media blog.
The slides from my presentation are here.
Update
Ricci [...]
I’ll be speaking on the Brand and Reputation Management Session.
Stop by the session or find me around the show.
Posted by David Naffziger in adwords, case law
11 Feb
SearchEngineLand wrote on a recent ruling by a French court that fined Google 350,000 Euros for allowing companies to bid on the trademarks of two companies.
Google maintains two policies for trademark use in AdWords: The policy in the US/UK/IE/CA and the policy used in the Rest of the World. Google’s policy in France allows [...]
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the very recent rise in online fraud. It certainly suggests that fraud rises in the downturn.
The bear economy is creating a bull market for cyber-crooks.
Experts and law-enforcement officials who track Internet crime say scams have intensified in the past six months, as fraudsters [...]
We were honored to be nominated for the Semmy Award for best PPC post of 2008 for our post on Search Engine PPC Trademark policies.
Our thanks and gratitude to the nominating committee!
Posted by David Naffziger in PPC, adwords
14 Jan
PPCHero has a great post that discusses why trademarked terms are allowed in display URLs:
Basically, a company can have a trademarked name as a real sub-domain on their site for site architecture purposes. Example, using the same Nike reference, if I own a website called shoesgalore.com, and I have a full page of [...]