Handsome Logic

Many moons ago, American Blinds & Wallpaper Factory was involved in a lawsuit with Google over trademarked/branded keyword bidding on AdWords. The case ended with American Blinds giving up for “financial reasons” and gaining nothing from this torrid ordeal.

Now, Jeff Alderman, who is the Director of Online Marketing and Business Development at American Blinds is asking the LinkedIn Answers community the following question:

In your personal opinion is it ethical that some search engines sell branded keywords to competitors to advertising on?

I did so much eye-rolling over the course of this case that I can actually see the hair in the back of my head now. This whole affair was second only to Fox News reporting that Google is taking political sides by not allowing advertisers to put up ads critical of MoveOn.org. If American Blinds is so worried about ads confusing users, then why do they use a redirecting display URL in their AdWords ads?

Having waged war on my fair share of typosquatters, content theives and trademark bidding competitors, I should be the first one campaigning to make proactive brand and trademark protection the search engines’ responsibility.

But I’m not.

Bob Parsons and GoDaddy are not responsible for making sure that no domain typos or names involving trademarked brands are registered.

The hosting team at 1and1 don’t actively scour all content put online by their customers to make sure it doesn’t violate someone else’s copyright. You can hardly get them to cancel your account, much less spot-check it for copyright infringement!

And no, Google is not responsible for making sure that your virtual rear end is covered.

But speaking of covering rear ends…

If I was a company, let’s say a blinds and wallpaper company, and I was involved in a case that was being discussed on hundreds of blogs that have NOTHING to do with my product or industry, many of whom were running AdSense… I’d be a little more careful with my content network bidding. Wouldn’t want my ads to be ripe for the clicking on Search Engine Land, John Battelle’s Searchblog, and every other SEM and Law blog on the web.