Search Engine Monkeying

I’ve been trying to weed out competitors using our Trademarked terms in their ad copy and I’ve been having limited success. Usually, a trademark holder would just contact the offending party and threaten to sue them. This is relatively successful and there are previous cases that set a precedent so, more then likely, you’d win. Our trademark violators, on the other hand, are distributors that simply refuse to play by the rules. Management has been slow to discipline the parties that are infringing on our trademark so eventually I decided to use Google’s trademark complaint procedure to enforce our trademarks.

The whole process took a couple of weeks for the trademark complaint to take affect but eventually Google disapproved all the competitor/distributor ads with our brands in the copy.

Thats when things got interesting.

1) The Google Trademark Complaint does not recognize variations in the display URL. Display URLs such as BuyApple.com are perfectly alright to use as well as any variation of the domain. Instead of .com, if you can find .net, .biz, or .us you can use the trademarked term in the display URL. You might not think this is a big deal but the text in the display URL is still bold.

2) Expanding on the previous topic, Sub-domains can also be used in the display URL and will be bold when the user searches for the term. If the user searches for “ipods”, and your site is ipods.mysite.com, ipods will be bold in your display URL.

3) Google requires the trademark holder to notify Google every time a variation of the trademarked term is used in the ad copy. Kudos to Google for letting trademark holders expand beyond the basic term or phrase, however, there is almost an infinate number of ways to get around the trademark term without using the trademark. Using a capital i instead of a l, adding the ® directly to the end of the phrase (or any number of special or spanish characters), adding a space to the term, or even basic misspelling. How many consumers read the whole phrase anyway especially if the phrase is a long word, or technical word, or two different words together?

4) Lastly, an advertiser can always use the dynamic keyword tool to insert the trademarked term into the ad copy dynamically.

I have to admit that there are some special cases that I think trademark cases are overblown and maybe it’s best Google shows some restraint. The recent Zale’s dating ring ruling is a perfect example of a company taking trademark protection too far. In my own experience, a company trademarked the term “Type 1″ even though there are at least three different common uses for the term (think diabetes, fonts, Levi’s Jeans).

With Google being such a powerful online entity it has to do something about trademark infringement. Maybe instead of focusing on the term, Google should focus on companies that hope to confuse consumers. Thats the reason trademark laws were written in the first place.

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