By Elmer on May 6, 2009

I guess the headline means both good and bad news, depending on who we ask. With Google’s recent announcement that it will not investigate use of trademarks as keywords in many countries, this means trademark owners don’t have much control of their keywords. This is good news to retailers and non-trademark owners in general who used to think that trademarked keywords are untouchables. This is bad news to trademark owners, who are now helpless when someone else copies the keyword and places it within their ads.

Until recently, if Apple sees a retailer using the terms iPhone or iPod, it has the right to lodge a complaint to Google. Poor advertisers who have no control of these terms have to be creative, by using substitute terms like 1pod or iPh0ne (note the numbers 1 and 0). This practice theoretically dents a campaign’s efforts to improve keyword Quality Score.

Note the following screen capture for the phrase “ipod”. A lot of shops in Hong Kong sell iPods but no ads are shown except for Apple’s own paid search ad, presumably aimed at controlling the whole results page.

According to Search Engine Land, China and Macau are territories where this change is not applicable. I see no Hong Kong in the list, nor at those countries/territories where trademarked keywords restriction are removed. So I assume that the past policy on trademarked terms is still enforced here.

The countries that this trademark policy does not apply to are Australia, Cyprus, Hungary, New Zealand, South Korea, Austria, Czech Republic, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Bahamas, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Lithuania, Portugal, Switzerland, Brazil, France, Luxembourg, Romania, Taiwan, Bulgaria, Germany, Macau, Slovakia, China, Greece, Netherlands, and Slovenia.

But that appears to be part of history, at least to those countries listed in the link above. Advertisers and brand owners now compete head to head when it comes to keyword bidding. Gone are the days when retailers have to defer using trademarked terms and be more creative when crafting ad copies.

Does this mean Google is expecting a bigger revenue stream from advertisers because of the loosened restrictions? Or maybe Google has fewer people (having laid off some folks recently) to work on trademark infringements?

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