Do you really own your name when you advertise on the Internet? This question is well…questionable when it comes to pay per click advertising. Trademark violations are a growing problem when it comes to advertising on the Internet. People have found ways to profit off of other companies brand names. The search engines would probably agree, this is a very hard issue to enforce.

I have recently had to deal with trying to shut down trademark violators on Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I am very familiar with the processes necessary for shutting trademark violators down. I wish I could say this is an easy task, but the trademark issue is always on-going, and you have to monitor your brand name very carefully in order to succeed in Internet pay per click advertising.

Google Trademark Violators
Google took about 2-3 months to process my trademark violation forms. You can find the form online at Google Trademark Form. Make sure that you allow your own Adwords account permission to use your trademarks. When Google shut down my trademarked terms, at first they did not allow me permission to use my own company name. This caused many competitors the chance to use different variations of my name to drive traffic. This drove a lot of my traffic over to their sites, since I was unable to create a more credible ad to draw attention. After two days of kicking and screaming, I was able to resolve this issue with the Google trademark team.

Another issue with Google trademark policies is that they do not enforce trademark violations in the display url field. When I emailed Google to see if they could shut down competition using my exact URL they replied with this….

“We do not investigate URLs as a part of our trademark complain procedure because the use of a URL does not necessarily constitute trademark use, particularly in the case of post domain paths or sub-domains. Google is not in the position to be the arbiter of third party disputes, we encourage you to contact the advertiser directly regarding your concerns.”

That is just fantastic! So while Google is saying that my competition can no longer use my brand name in their ad copy, they can go ahead and use my URL to try and sneak people over to their site, and this is “legal”. This is basically Google’s way of saying “Go ahead and threaten legal action against these guys, just leave us out of it.”

MSN Trademark Violators
I have plenty of issues with MSN Ad Center as whole, but they really did a pretty decent job of shutting down my trademark violators. The process did take 2-3 months, and it took some follow up emails to get the job done. Either way when the trademarks were removed, it left me as the only company allowed to advertise under my name when searched. That means when you do a MSN Live search for my company name I am the only advertisement that shows up. This is great because it really removes any fraudulent play from the equation. As of now, there is no confusion when you are searching for my company, that you are going to find my company. If only Google was bold enough to do this, but I know that they are making money off placing all those random advertisements next to my search.

Yahoo Trademark Violators
My Yahoo trademark violation issues are still pending for the most part. I have sent them all of my information about 2-3 months ago, and my competition is still using my name excessively. Even worse, there is some competition out there using my trademark name, with a phony little trademark symbol next to it! There is also competition using my name and my URL exactly as i would normally use it. This is not only confusing to my potential clients, its illegal! I have sent Yahoo emails to try and resolve this issue, but at this point have not heard any follow-up. So as of today, Yahoo’s efforts to stop trademark violations gets a failing grade.

Summary
Violating your competitions’ trademark is flat out unethical and ugly. There are so many ways to drive traffic to your site besides trying to pass yourself off as somebody else. Show some creativity and think outside the box when making pay per click ads and keywords. More importantly, be ethical and respect your competition. If you tarnish your industry by using fraudulent ads, people will stop looking for any of your niche’s services on the Internet. So what goes around, will come around when your business starts to struggle in the end.

Be vigilant with your trademarked terms. Protect them the same way you would protect you car or house. After all, these terms are your property and this is what defines your company image. Don’t be afraid to kick and scream at the search engines that you are being wrongly displayed on the Internet. Even though they seem to forget this from time to time, the search engines need to make you happy as an advertiser. They need to protect their clients and do their best to make you satisfied with their service.

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