Epicenter Network Blog

Starting June 4th Google plans to open up trademarked keywords to AdWords advertisers. This is going to make for some heated battles in the search engine results pages over company names, branded products and services.

Google released a list of 200 countries that are allowed to purchase rival trademarks as keywords to trigger display ads. Check out the complete list here.

However, this is new is not entirely new. Google has allowed for bidding on trademarked keywords in the past, but would slap you on the hand if they received any complaints. The difference now is that trademarked companies’ complaints won’t be accepted. You also still can’t use a competitor’s trademark in your ad.

For affiliate marketers, this opens up the potential for more money. However, there are still many advertisers that enforce their own rules for keyword restrictions, and those will still have to be followed.

This decision comes at an interesting time, as a prior court ruling in 2006 was overturned recently in the Rescuecom v. Google case. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed the lower court ruling and said that recommending and “selling” a trademark to an advertiser to trigger a sponsored link could violate trademark law.

They went on to say that even product placements could be subject to trademark law if the trademark holder could prove that the consumers were confused.

Good luck proving that one.