Posts tagged Trademark
Google Gets Trademark Reprieve In Sweden Over Definition Of ‘Ungoogleable’
Mar 26th
“Ungoogleable” won’t become an official word in Sweden … at least not this year. As Sveriges Radio reports (found via The Verge), the Language Council of Sweden won’t be adding ogooglebar, which translates to “ungoogleable,” to its official list of new…
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Google Streamlines AdWords Rules On Using Trademark Keywords
Mar 25th
Google has announced an update to its AdWords trademark policy that streamlines the rules on using third-party trademark keywords in campaigns. With the update, Google now has a consistent global policy that allows advertisers to bid on competitor third-party trademark keywords. The update states:…
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With Holiday Sales Comes an Increase in Trademark Bidding
Dec 12th
Let’s begin here with a question: “What happens when you do a quick search for yours or your client’s brand and/or website URL?” Hopefully, you’re coming up near the top in the organic SERPs, but you might also notice a fair number of paid ads appearing as well. Such a result leads to further questions [...]
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What Trademark Search Data Can Reveal About User Behavior
May 25th
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been challenged by advertisers on the topic of trademark search. The question is simple: why “waste” money buying traffic on trademark keywords when it is clear that the user intends to get to their site? Researching the topic, there have been a number of…
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Dallas SEO Expert Mike Stewart Testifies Regarding Sensitive Trademark Issues … – PR Web (press release)
Apr 10th
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Dallas SEO Expert Mike Stewart Testifies Regarding Sensitive Trademark Issues …
PR Web (press release) SMB SEO LLC, a Dallas-based advertising agency, helps small and medium-sized businesses grow in revenue by dominating online, mobile and social media marketing channels. SMB SEO offers a cost effect, transparent, and holistic search engine marketing … |
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AdGooroo Trademark Insight Tool Makes Infringement Monitoring A Breeze
Jan 20th
Some of you may not have any issues with other advertisers infringing on your trademarked terms via search marketing… count yourselves lucky. For those of us who have been left by the search engines to self-police these problems, AdGooroo’s Trademark Insight tool can turn a laborious challenge into…
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No More ‘BBX’: Trademark Dispute Reveals Strange RIM Stance
Dec 7th
A temporary restraining order issued by a federal court in Albuquerque on behalf of a software company that produces a version of BASIC, has compelled Research In Motion to start calling the next version of its operating system for BlackBerry smartphones “BlackBerry 10.” This according to a tweet from the company’s official Twitter feed.
The name BBx (albeit with a small “x”) is being used by Basis Software of Albuquerque as a trademark for its Business BASIC language interpreter, which is a classic language interpreter capable of extending business logic established over the previous decades to a platform that reaches smartphones, including BlackBerrys. Perhaps the most startling element of this case came from RIM, whose U.S.-based subsidiary had claimed in court, according to the judge’s ruling, that the Singapore developers’ conference to which the restraining order applies is not all that important to anyone in America.
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“RIM argues that its alleged conduct would have an insufficient effect on United States commerce to grant an injunction,” reads Judge William P. Johnson’s ruling yesterday, “pointing out that the upcoming Singapore conference is intended to serve customers in Asia and that only several of the 700 people who will be attending the conference will be from the United States. RIM also contends that the conference will not be broadcast live, and any references on the Internet to the conference will not have the required significant effect on commerce.”
By contrast, Judge Johnson went on, Basis Software argued that it would be naïve for RIM or anyone else to assume that the impact of an Asia developers’ conference would be limited to Asia. “The Court agrees with this assessment,” he wrote, “finding it somewhat ironic that the very nature of the disputed software product is making world-wide dissemination of information more easily accessible than before.”
“BlackBerry 10″ was a name that had been bandied about in the press and elsewhere as a likely name for its completely new operating system, which was previewed last October in San Francisco. The new system represents a developmental dead-end for BB OS 9, whose architecture could not adequately be extended to the emerging tablet market that RIM must also cover, preferably not with a separate OS as with today’s PlayBook.
One of the developmental hurdles the next BlackBerry system continues to face – one for which developers worldwide will indeed be looking to Singapore for clues to a solution – concerns a key element of its authentication mechanism. Historically, BlackBerry users have been associated with single phones, with the understanding that it wouldn’t make sense for someone to own two or three mobile phones. The emergence of the tablet changes all that. Today, for a PlayBook tablet to access a BlackBerry user’s account, it must be tethered to a physical BlackBerry phone – an connection which the manufacturer (unsuccessfully) tried to market as fun and exciting.
Another hurdle concerns the new system’s identity, the name change for which may (just as ironically) reveal the limited impact it may have on the consumer mindset.
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Twitter Settles Lawsuit, Gets “Tweet” Trademark
Oct 11th
Twitter and Twittad have settled their dispute over the word “tweet,” though Twittad will retain the right to use the tagline, “Let your ad meet tweets.”
Twitter has been trying to trademark “tweet” since Apri…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Exposing Black Hat PPC Techniques: Stealing Competitor’s Trademark Traffic in Google Adwords
Jul 14th
Want to learn how to steal your competitor’s high-quality brand traffic and redirect it to your site using Google Adwords? “Against their terms,” you say? Rubbish! I’ll show you how a black hatter did just that to a client of mine costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost traffic!
Recently, a client ran into an issue with their Google Adwords campaigns. Their brand-targeted campaigns began to produce fewer and fewer conversions, while their CPA (cost-per-action) started climbing rapidly. It wasn’t long before they were paying twice as much per conversion and getting half as many per day. A quick bit of investigation revealed that we were only getting a small share of the available queries for our well-known brand and domain name.
An inspection of Google’s results revealed nothing. There was my client’s ad, where it should be with no other ads present. Obviously whoever was siphoning off traffic was being very deceptive about it. My initial thought was that they were day-parting their traffic and only showing their ad during early morning hours, but after a few sleepless nights i confirmed this wasn’t the problem.
My next step was to use a proxy that was located in a different state to check the Google results. An ad which appeared to belong to my client showed up, with the same title & description and showing my client’s website. Clicking the ad caused a competitor’s site to come up instead of my client’s site, a clear violation of Google’s terms since the URL of the final destination, after the redirect, did not match the ad’s display URL.
I went back to Google to see if the ad showed up for my client’s domain as well as their brand name. It did. I clicked it again, but this time I got redirected to my client’s site instead of the competitor. I went back to the original trademark term i had searched and clicked the ad again. Again I was redirected to my client’s site.
“Well that’s weird,” I thought.
I copied and pasted the destination url and found something that looked like this:
http://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=CAsqXJqLITbLjK8iagQfkqe2DCuD_lZ4CiG7G1yyV3J4xCAAQAVCGvph1YMnWrIfco 8QQyAEBqQJWZt7pooqYPqoEHk_QE2yD9UlXdHsS-zdkm2-4VemNnXiQxxZQ38nPw&sig=AGiWqtwAJ2evlzQJvjiJDaoysxKsaXy3Xw&ved=0CAgQ0Qw&adurl=http://someredirectdomainwithalotofcha racterssothatitlookslikeparametersintheurlinsteadofaredirectdomain.eu/track/61/
Google prefaces your ad’s destination URL with a bunch of encrypted encrypted information so they can measure clickthroughs and other information. In order to see the actual URL, you have to isolate whatever is after “adurl=”
http://someredirectdomainwithalotofcharacterssothatitlookslikeparametersinthe urlinsteadofaredirectdomain.eu/track/61/
This was the actual destination URL of the ad. I did a fruitless WHOIS search of the domain which turned up nothing because the domain had privacy protection enabled.
So then I thought, they are using my client’s registered trademark so I’ll file a trademark infringement complaint with Google. Surely, this will do the trick! Since they had copied my client’s ad copy verbatim, it should be a fairly easy process to get ad removed. However I made the mistake of not reading the form thoroughly and check both the box that says I’m complaining about the keywords they are bidding on and about their ad copy. After three weeks of waiting for a response, my complaint was denied. Turns out that in the US, you cannot complain about others bidding on your trademark terms. If you check that box, they just deny it even if your complaint about the ad copy is legitimate.
So my next step was to notify the policy team, through my Adwords rep, that this advertiser was violating Google’s terms by redirecting to a competitor instead of the display URL. To my dismay I received a response that the final landing page they kept seeing was my client’s site instead of the competitor’s site. I was at a dead end.
I decided to dig deeper and see exactly what this shady advertiser was doing. What I discovered was a black hatter’s dream. This guy had built a PHP redirect script which redirected users to his link on the first click, and to my client’s site every other click after that. It worked by storing the IP address of the incoming request and would reset every 24 hours. This made it very difficult to detect. Even though you may see the competitor’s site on the first click, every other click after that took you to my client’s site making it appear as everything was fine.
What was brilliant about this, is that the first click is by far the most valuable one. Most people will only click an ad once and either buy something or not. The second time they click they are half as likely to convert as the first time. If they click three or more times within the same day, the system is likely to flag their activity as click fraud so theoretically you would be refunded for it anyway.
In addition, you can make the script’s activity harder to detect if you grab a list of googlebot IP’s so that Adwords is never able to automatically disable your ads due to the destination not matching the display URL of the ad. Another nifty trick this black hatter was doing was to use IP-based geolocation to always show my client their site rather than the competitor’s, making it even harder to detect.
In the end, I ended up having to recreate the issue and record it on video in order to prove to Google’s compliance department that there was a problem. Even with that, it took them three months to finally get around to shutting this black hatter’s ads off. Overall, the competitor’s ads ran for 6 months and cost my client hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why would someone like myself write a story about this? Aren’t I opening the door to a militia of black hatters that could copy this technique and replicate it? Yes, but not because I condone this behavior. The bottom line is that this is happening right now by a handful of black hatters that were sneaky enough to figure this out. By bringing this to light, I am hoping that Google invests some time into figuring out how to permanently put an end to this glaring issue. If this were done to an overly bureaucratic non-technical fortune 500 company, it may take years for anyone to detect it and cost that company millions in lost sales.
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Exposing Black Hat PPC Techniques: Stealing Competitor’s Trademark Traffic in Google Adwords
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