Hi Everyone,
I am currently looking into having our competitors removed from bidding on terms that relate to my companies business.

My company runs a successful magazine that is published monthly in Ireland and has been doing so for the past 10+ years. As a result we have a well established brand name in the market and many searches are conducted monthly for the magazine online.

The magazine has an online variation for users to buy and sell products. Unfortunately many of our competitors are now bidding on our terms here is an example:

www.ourdomainname.ie

our domain name

and some are also bidding on the acronym of our name
our domain name = odn

I have used the https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint form but I am wondering if I should also send follow up letters from a solicitor with a cease and desist statement to our competitors to give them a bit of a scare and make them retract their bidding on those words or at least include negative terms.

Has anyone had much experience with this? What is the most effective solution you have found so far?

I don't feel this is Google's / Yahoo's or MSN's issue to police but hope they will see fit to disable our competitors, I see this though as the advertiser's responsiblity for his or her actions. I'm not sure how Google will react to our request to remove the competitors however I see bidding on our domain name and acronym particularly unfair from a legal perspective.

Cheers,
Gavin.

Google should disable the keywords if you lodge a valid complaint. They did for us, though I've noticed that it seems to only affect the standard adwords PPC ads and hasn't filtered into some of their related PPC networks

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Yes I noticed that for Adsense its another procedure you need to take in order to have ads disabled there.

I have not yet received a confirmation email from Google regarding receipt of my complaint. Guess I'll just have to wait.

I'm not sure I follow

Adsense is just the flipside of adwords ...

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If it is a trademarked name, can't see why Google can't disable same. Is it trademarked etc. or is it generic?

Be aware that you can only stop the use of REGISTERED trademarks.

So for example, if the redistered trademark for my company was "red fly marketing" there is no way in hell I could stop anyone using "red fly marketing". You need to TM both.

Also, don't expect them to stop BIDDING on your TM, that is allowed as long as they don't use the TM in the ad.

If you pester Google enough though, they will slap them with a poor quality score. (That last statement is not true although I am starting to think it is).

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That's actually not true. You can also block common law trademarks

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But only in certain countries right? Like you can't in the UK?

Yes you can

I had to do it for us before our trademarks came through

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How about bidding on a domain name? As you know some people type the address in Google or Yahoo! or whatever. They think the search box is the address bar.

Sometimes it happens due to the way a page loads and where the tab index is at.

So if my website was mywebsite.com

and someone typed into Google mywebsite.com and a competitor was bidding on that, surely Google could disable this?