I ran across an interesting article today that stated the US Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by a district court that says the use of trademarked terms in meta tags can constitute trademark infringement. It is common that website owners want to get ranked for trademarked phrases such as Coke or Pepsi and it appears that it is not ok to optimize for those phrases.
We do however get mixed signals from Google in the sense that they do allow bidding on trademark phrases in the US, UK, Ireland and Canada as long as you don't use the trademark in your ad content. Yahoo! is a little more clear cut on their trademark bidding policies. I usually don't recommend going after competitors' terms and there are some search engine marketers who call it unethical.
Ask your marketing department or website manager if you are in violation of any search engine's terms and agreements. If you are designing a new site, make sure you find out if it is within the search engine guidelines before doing in-depth research on keyword phrases for organic search engine listings or pay per click listings .
Posted on
Wed, April 9, 2008
by Justin Boeckman