SEO Video Blog – Protecting Trademarks in Google Adwords and Adsense #46
Updated Friday 29th - After recently applying to stop a other Adword users using my clients Trademarked name I had the following response from Google.
Thanks for your email.
Thanks for submitting your trademark complaint. Please note that we will
not be able to process for the trademark “company name” at this time because
you are not listed as the owner of that trademark. We only accept
trademark complaint letters from the owners of the trademarks or their
authorised agents.If you believe that you are the owner of this trademark, please send us
proof that you own the trademark. If you believe that you are authorised
to act on the behalf of the trademark owner, you will need to have the
trademark owner contact us directly and state that you are authorised to
act on their behalf.Also please note that we investigate the use of trademarks in ad text.
However, we do not investigate URLs as part of our trademark complaint
procedure. This is because the use of a URL does not necessarily
constitute trademark use, particularly in the case of post-domain paths or
subdomains.Display URLs must accurately reflect the URL of the advertiser’s website.
We have several AdWords link policies created to ensure that ads use
Display URLs which accurately indicate where a user will be led when
clicking the ad.Because Google is not in a position to be the arbiter of third-party
disputes, we encourage you to contact the advertiser directly regarding
your concerns. Additionally, if the domain name contains or is similar to
a trademark – but is actually owned by the advertiser – the trademark
owner is the appropriate party to handle the matter, such as through the
Uniform Domain Resolution Process (UDRP).Kind regards,
Bryan
The Google Trademark Team,
Google Ireland Ltd.
Gordon House
Barrow Street
Dublin 4
Ireland
This suggested that your search agency can not longer ask Google to protect the trademark and it has to come directly from the Trademark owner.
Welcome to this week’s SEO video blog, we’re going to show you how to protect your company against trademark infringement in Google’s paid advertisement services.
If you have a registered UK trademark and a competitor is using Google Adwords or Adsense to generate business and clicks from your company’s trademark, you can protect yourself by filing a Google Adwords trademark compliant.
The trademark owner does not need to be an Adwords advertiser in order to register a complaint with Google, but Google will only investigate ads served by their paid advertisement services and not organic search.
If someone is using your company trademark to generate business via the organic search then you are recommended to contact the company directly.
Contacting a company directly will ensure that they are not passing off with any other paid advertisement services from other search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing.
We have linked the trademark form from the supporting blog post and they do specify that they will only investigate and not guarantee to restrict Adwords users using your company name or trademarked product.
You can submit either a general trademark complaint or you can specify the particular adverts that are using your trademark.
In a specific compliant, Google will ask you to provide the exact URLs that it should investigate. It is important to note that it will not investigate any others.
A general complaint will investigate any advertisements and you do not need to provide specific URL’s. However, it is important that you declare any advertisers that are authorized to use your company trademarks.
You are required to provide your UK trademark ID in order to proceed with the complaint.
It is relatively easy to spot a protected trademark, as you will see no sponsored listing on a search result.
You can see from this ‘British Airway’ query that the only sponsored listing is British Airways themselves.
Some other examples are:
Peugeot, the car manufacturer
And
Cadbury’s, which only shows the promotional website and the individual product websites.
Thanks for watching, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the supporting blog post.
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint
April 19th, 2010
Not too sure how I found this blog but glad I did find it. Think I was looking for something else on facebook. Not sure I agree 100% with what you say, but have bookmarked and will pop back to read to see if you add any more posts. Keep up the good work