Google cracking down on domains using its trademarks

Speaking of "heart attack letters" from Google, I was notified yesterday that my domain MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com (the companion site for my book of the same name) was in violation of the "Google brand features" section of the terms and conditions (see Section 12) and that they're no longer allowing me to display ads on that site. Looks like they're starting to crack down on all AdSense publishers who have domains with Google trademarks in them. I'd be curious to know if anyone else is seeing this yet.

There's a form you can fax in to get permission to use such trademarks, so hopefully they'll let me display ads on the site again.

I knew about this rule, so don't go crying for me, but they didn't seem to be enforcing it until now.

 

Wow! That's a bitch.

Eric, what about your book itself? Where do you stand with that?

 

guess running yahoo on the google tip site might look strange to visitors

 

oh sorry for you.
That is bad. Your sites are good.
Iam sure you will find a way!

Me I have ask Chitika "before" I went to open a domain with the name Chitika in it.

 

The book's fine, many book titles have trademarks in them. I'm not sure how else you could write about specific projects or anything without mentioning the product name in the title...

I'm sure I'll get this sorted out. Showing YPN ads would be funny, yes, but I can't even consider that at this point because I'm in Canada and YPN is still US-only

 

Intressting to know.

 

I bet it won't be too (for YPN) long... you can always revenue share with someone that has YPN.

 

I bought his book and read it, it's somewhat of a manual on how to use Adsense. I'm sure they're thrilled that he wrote it and even if they could they wouldn't want to do any harm to it.

 

I'm not expecting any special treatment. I filled out the requisite form and faxed it in, we'll see what they say. If they don't like it then either I'll switch to the memwg.com domain (the shorthand version of the domain which I use throughout the book for shorter URLs) or else I just won't display any AdSense ads on that particular domain. Probably the former. The AdSense income from MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com isn't very much, most AdSense publishers are pretty stingy about clicking other people's ads, what with banner blindness and all, but I do feel that it's useful as a promoter of AdSense as a content monetization technique that I display some AdSense ads on the book's site...

We'll see what happens. I don't know how quickly they respond to the permission requests.

 

This has been ongoing for several months at least, maybe longer. I have heard from others with Google in the domain names who have been blocked from showing AdSense on those sites.

 

Eric... just to let know a lot about copyright issues as I use the Elvis name and image on my site.

According to law (worldwide) you cannot copyright a book title... eg. Should I wish to publish a book with the title "Macbeth" or "Elvis" you can.

In addition, some copyrights cannot extend worldwide... as in my example EPE Inc only holds the copyrights to the Elvis image and name in the USA because they can only hold copyright to the country that the person in question was born... Thank goodness, I live and work in Australia. So even thought Graceland would love to cut off all the Elvis Fan Club (which they did in the USA) they can't touch anyone using their Elvis trademark outside the USA.

So, you might be able to still sell and promote your Adsense Book.

Do let us know the outcome... as Google has more money than G*D it will be interesting to learn how far the will persue the issue of copyright?

 

The book title is not an issue at all, we're only talking about the domain here. And the domain is only an issue because of the section in the AdSense terms and conditions that lets Google enforce whatever trademark restrictions it wants to.

Really, this wasn't a surprise to me. A few months ago I saw a referrer header in my logs that was a URL to an internal Google website that appeared (by the name of the file) to be a list of domains on Google's "hit list". It just took them a while to get to me. I'll let you guys know what happens.

 

This is actually a Trademark issue, not a copyright issue.

See http://www.google.com/permissions/trademarks.html for a little more info about Google®'s Tradmarks.

 

are you going to write a book about YPN?

 

Not until YPN goes out of beta and is open to non-US publishers... even then, I'm not sure what would be very different. Most of the content of Make Easy Money with Google works equally well with YPN already. Obviously, the AdSense-specific stuff would change, but it wouldn't be a complete rewrite by any means. But it's not on my plan right now. I think an advanced AdSense e-book would be better, I hear that Joel guy makes money doing it

 

and again you have registered a Adsense Domain. uncommonadsense.com

???

 

Can "Googlesense" be considered as a violation??

Thanks,

 

I'm not planning on showing AdSense ads on it, of course, so it doesn't matter.

 

Yes. If it has the word "Google" in it or any of Google's trademarks, whether or not they're separate keywords doesn't matter....

 

Hi Eric, I recieved the same email about one of our sites. We very quickly removed them. I checked a few other sites I know with "Adsense" in the title and running adsense, they were also targeted and asked to remove the ads....... one of them was a forum owned by the great man himself "JC".