Trademark Infringement

Trademark infringement issues are of great concern to Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertisers. Twenty percent (20%) of all searches online are trademark searches.

Businesses around the world are losing millions of dollars because of trademark infringements. It also drives the price of PPC ads upwards. Companies often bid on the brand names of their competitors. This means that when a searcher types in your brand name the ads for your competitors appear. They click on your competitor’s site thinking it is related to your site.

This is basically a form of bait and switch fraud, which offers your customers an alternative brand to your product.

Defending Your Brand Against Trademark Violations
Conduct search audits at least once every month.

• Organic Search Results
• Paid Search Results
• PPC Contextual Ads

Look at both the questionable result and the site displayed in the result. When looking over the possible violator’s site, don’t just look over the visible content on the site; look over the code as well to uncover hidden text, image alt tags, and keyword meta tags that may include your trademarked names.

There is also the possibility that they may be using a cloaked page, which includes your trademark. To check this out, you will need to view the search engine’s cached page on file.

Document all of your findings by dating the violation as well as the site owner’s complete contact information. Obtain Whois information for the site. Once you have all of this documented, you will need to send your findings to the appropriate search engine. For both organic and paid results, use a “screen capture” of the page displaying the mark infringement. For cases wherein trademark infringement is visible on a website, you should save the entire page’s code as an .htm file.

This is often a laborious process if you don’t know where to begin. CLEANmy.NAME can take over this tedious, but necessary process, giving you some added peace of mind.