Google & Affiliates - Rumor?

There is a rumor circulating on some boards about Google possibly banning affiliates from 3rd party trademark bidding. This could put a serious damper on some affiliate's earnings.

Have you heard about this? Any thoughts or guesses on what will happen?

Google Rumors on Cutting Trademark Bidding [11/12/2004]
http://www.revenews.com/wayneporter/archives/000277.html

 

Some affiliate programs already forbid bidding on their names, don't they? Seems natural that companies would try to get Google to do the blocking for them.

Of course, this can be challenging. Will Google block misspellings? What about companies whose names mean something in one industry, but is a legitimate descriptive keyword in others? This wouldn't be easy to implement.

 

You can't advertise in the keyword "Toys R Us", but you can advertise in "R Toys Us", and it'll come up in the searches.

Google can't be responsible for trademark policing as a whole. A company probably has to complain before an ad will be removed. If they complain a lot, or if they are a big enough company, the trademarks will probably be blocked by default.

Companies relying on affiliate programs probably will never complain. Somebody who's affiliates are getting out of hand and don't provide enough business probably will.

 

I just heard that Google indeed limits the affiliates to 1. I am not into this too much, I heard this on a meeting in a coffee break were google was talking with a wellknown affiliate company. They really do limit the affiliates. I am not talking about the trademarks, I just talk about for example how Ebay affiliates can not all bid on ebay words, because they all go to Ebay. They want to increase the diversity of companies in the results.

If I told this correct. I am not sure I explained it correct as, like I said, I am not into affiliating too much, but I did hear Google talk about it with the affiliate company so the thing itself is indeed happening.

 

If you are an AdWords advertiser, they don’t allow you to use certain trademarked words. If you try to use them in your ads, you automatically receive the following announce:

But they also offer a form to request an exception, where they state:

They recommend checking the Trademarked Term policy in their AdWords Editorial Guidelines about the issue:
http://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html#Po5

More info about the Exception Requests can be found in the AdWords Glossary:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=7523&topic=29

You can also check the Google's AdSense trademark policy:

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6118

And consider also checking their Guidelines for Third Party Use of Google's Trademarks:

http://www.google.com/permissions/trademarks.html

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