How Google's Trademark Change Impacts Affiliates and Merchants

[Linda Buquet]

Google recently made changes to it's policy regarding use of trademarks in Adwords. The new policy allows for trademarks to be used as keywords and within the ad copy, unless the trademark holder requests exclusion.

SearchEngineLand has a detailed write up about how this change could impact affiliates, merchants and other advertisers.

<strong><a href="http://searchengineland.com/how-will-google%E2%80%99s-recent-trademark-changes-affect-you-19444">How Will Google?s Recent Trademark Changes Affect You?</a></strong>

<strong>How will this change affect affiliates?</strong>

"Affiliates who direct link to a merchant?s site can gain tremendously by this change. Those affiliates can now go and buy a significant amount of trademarked keywords as their accounts should be treated just like the merchant buying traffic directly to their site.

Affiliates who send traffic to their own sites, however, may find the new rule change makes things more difficult. For example?" <a href="http://searchengineland.com/how-will-google%E2%80%99s-recent-trademark-changes-affect-you-19444">More?</a>

Hot off the press today and a good tie in to the post above:
<strong><a href="http://searchengineland.com/how-to-protect-your-brand-under-google%e2%80%99s-new-trademark-policies-19611">How To Protect Your Brand Under Google?s New Trademark Policies</a></strong>

Also Geno from AM Navigator just posted this:
<strong><a href="http://www.amnavigator.com/blog/2009/05/19/new-google-trademark-policy-affiliate-marketing-implications/">New Google Trademark Policy - Affiliate Marketing Implications</a></strong>