As many of you may recall, in May 2004 Geico filed lawsuits against Google and Yahoo! for allowing competitors to bid on a trademarked term such as "Geico."  The current policy at Google is to allow companies to bid on trademark terms, even if their advertisement is for a competitive product. However, the actual ad text cannot contain any mention of the trademark.  An advertiser must file the appropriate paperwork with Google, as well as actively monitor for violations.  Despite this, there are still some ambiguities and examples of trademark violations that require advertisers to be better aware in order to prevent disputes.  Here are some additional Paid Search Trademark disputes worth reading.

According to Google, Yahoo! has more complicated policies.  Advertisers cannot bid on trademark terms or use them in ad text unless they meet certain conditions. Yahoo! specifies that the advertiser’s web content must make a “nominative fair use” of the trademark, or use the word in a clearly generic manner. MSN has made recent changes to their trademark policy that allow for greater flexibility.  Both engines’ policies permit reseller and non-competitive information websites to engage in these search marketing practices.

It is evident that there is still room for dispute, and that it would be beneficial for more clearly and coherent principles across all the search engines. Until then, marketers must keep these points in mind so as to avoid the likes of another Geico lawsuit.

Article by Artina Sheikh and Adam Heimlich

On the evening of Friday, September 7^th, Microsoft adCenter made a system update to upgrade tools and functionality. These changes were made to give users better control of their advertising campaigns with Microsoft adCenter. This upgrade included significant improvements in editorial efficiency, campaign creation, and campaign management.

Some highlights from the recent upgrade are listed below. If you would like to review a comprehensive list of edits/additions with this release, read the Feature Release Guide.

• Faster editorial reviews for new ad groups
• Simplified campaign creation - import campaigns directly from other paid search programs or by copying existing ad groups within adCenter to a new campaign
• Instantly navigate to specific accounts, campaigns, or ad groups with the new adCenter home page dashboard
• Update keyword bids in bulk and view keyword performance on the same page
• Visualize your campaigns’ targeting settings with Microsoft Virtual Earth™ map integration for geographical targeting

For details on how to use these new adCenter improvements, including the ones listed above, please view the Feature Release Guide. In addition, the adCenter Blog provides detailed feature reviews.

If you need any additional information on this adCenter upgrade, please contact your Search Account Management Team or your Account Director.

Article by Michelle Kelly

Many people have embraced the phenomenon that is Digg, the social bookmarking and networking site. Digg allows people to share articles, video, and pictures with people who also share similar interests. From an SEO standpoint, we have seen several clients enjoy the success of having people Digg articles on their site that then rank highly in the search engines. While Digg breaks up content by categories well, it does not further break up that content by media type. Digg submissions are categorized into three types: News, Videos and Podcasts.

As we’ve seen with Google’s Universal Search, there are various other forms of media available that don’t fit into these three buckets. Traditionally, pictures, photos, etc. have been added to the News section of Digg, simply because there was no logical place for them. Typically, pictures are called out with [PIC] or [PICTURE] in the submitted story’s title. Digg is currently working to add this functionality, but someone has beaten them to it. Digpicz uses the Digg API to extract just pictures and put them all in one easy to Digg place.

This raises some interesting issues. Will media be broken down even further in the future? Should we expect to see verticals for animation added in the near future or is this overkill? Maybe someone will create these sections on their own so we can all see if it’s really worth it. Either way, we have seen success with Digg and think it will only continue as more forms of media are optimized.

Article by Paul McDevitt

So, You Want to Work in SEO…The VP of SEO and Web Analytics at Avenue A | Razorfish, William Flaiz, discusses the challenges of building an SEO practice.

Can’t remember the name of an article you had in your Google Reader? Google has added search functionality to their reader.

Facebook makes a major change by allowing public listings to be crawled by Search Engines.