Pixelrage.net

If you do SEM for your company, you’re already familiar with the fact that you have to bid on your own company’s name in AdWords et. al., this is a common practice in keyword bidding. Has anyone sat back and thought about how inconceivably ridiculous that really is?

In essence, it’s extortion: you have a heavily-hit search engine with its own advertising program, that allows anyone and everyone with some green stuff to bid on any keyword. Bid on your competitor – bid on their domain name, bid on their misspelling, you know the drill. Most importantly, bid on your own name so that nobody else beats you to the top position for these same things. Why on earth should anyone have to pay to appear on paid search for their own name, especially if it’s trademarked?

Trademark Protection in Google AdWords (Kinda)

Recently, Google began a new policy stating that AdWords users can successfully use trademarked brands within their ad text, regardless of if they own the trademark or not. So, feel free to throw in the actual brand name of that affiliate ad copy to your eBay store. It’s good for some, but murder for others. As for my company: a good $300/day is spent advertising just on our own company name, which is unique, and, of course, trademarked. If we ever stopped doing this, our bitter rival would take over their current 2nd spot as the 1st spot in all wild card search results for our company name.

Give or take, that’s a 6-figure expenditure per year, just to advertise for our own company name. Seriously. Morality has lost to money once again.

There actually is a measure you can take to “register” your registered trademark with Google Adwords, it’s perhaps the only way to protect your trademark in AdWords. By filling out a lengthy form and including your registered trademark serials, Google will block advertisers’ abilities to use your trademarked term in the title of an AdWords ad.

A good resolve would be to look at how Facebook tackles trademark infringement. If you’re a trademark owner, you’re entitled to own that trademarked name as a Facebook Page name (Facebook.com/whatever) – nobody else can have it. When it comes to Google search results, any search for your company’s registered trademark should yield a page with no PPC ads whatsoever. That’s in an ideal world, though.