http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003360.html According to an email received by a member of SEW forums, Yahoo will no longer allow bidding on brand keywords by non-brand owners. This is certainly big news, as bidding on competition brand names has long caused outrage by companies that find other organizations bidding on their trademark. Of course, very few companies check their trademark search terms regularly, so it is often not even noticed. And many of those that do notice it simply begin to bid on the competitor's brand too............. read it on se roundtable
Interesting. The playing field was sort of leveled out before. A little guy could buy up a Fortune 500 trademark in PPC and compete. Not so anymore, I guess. Brandon
Does that mean I can't bid on shoemoney, or on shoe any more? jk I agree that's a good thing indeed, shows the big guys want to help protect copyrights and stuff..
Probably not. I think it'd be quite difficult to verify which advertisers are allowed to bid on trademarked terms, and which ones aren't. Some companies may actually want their resellers to be able to bid on their trademarked term, but it sounds like they won't be able to. By the way, didn't Google lose the lawsuit against Geico? Where Geico sued them for allowing people to advertise for their trademarked keywords? I'm showing 2 adwords advertisers right now for a geico search. Maybe they just snuck through somehow. I've always found YSM/Overture more difficult to work with than Adsense. As far as I know, there's no automated way to appeal if you want to bid on a misspelled or unrecognized keyword.
It looks like Yahoo will no longer allow ads on keywords with competitors' names. Too bad but to be expected. I saw several articles on it today.
Probably, but it certainly makes it tougher for the little guy. Then again, the big boy developed that brand so it's not fair for someone else to steal it. Brandon
This is either a good thing, or a very, very bad thing. If they prevent people from bidding on "Geico" with their own car insurance company, then it is definitely a good thing, allowing companies to preserve their brand integrity. However, say you sell coca cola on your site and nothing else, bidding on "coca cola" is not trademark infringement, because you are offering that same product. Google bans this sort of usage, and being that my market is in brand name goods, they've lost out on a great deal of my marketing budget, to the delight of YSM. If YSM bans all usage of trademarked terms, we have a major issue, making PPC marketing a useless endeavor for a lot of smaller retailers.