Search Engine Optimization News Blog

An influential group of some of the UK’s largest brands is believed to have met last week to consider what step to take regarding Google’s change of policy regarding keywords.

Earlier this month, Google announced a change to their keywords policy in the UK, allowing competitors to bid for their rivals’ keywords including the trademarked names of their branded competitors. Previously, searches conducted in the UK had a better chance of ending up at the appropriate company’s website - almost 92 %, in fact.

In comparison, US searches have just over an 84% chance of ending up at their original destination- and many believe it is because of the lack of a policy governing trademarked keywords, as was available in the UK until just recently.

This leads many British and Irish businesses to worry that they will soon be shedding business to competitors who snap up their keywords on grand scale to give their own ads prominence during a similar search, although supposedly rival companies are not allowed to use the trademarks directly in the ad text.

In an interesting twist, Tesco, a large supermarket chain, stepped forward and declared they would not engage in buying trademarked keywords of competitors, and asking other companies to follow suit to keep minimum ad prices from skyrocketing.

The situation is escalating rapidly as companies throughout the UK are scrambling for position in a suddenly precarious market. The capacity for infringement is the priority concern as enforcement can be tricky when it comes to advertising and similar keywords, as was brought out in the recent US case where similar finance companies were disputing whether or not keyword use in text ads could be considered trademark infringement.

It is understood that the group that met prior to the weekend included representatives from The Association of British Travel Agents as well as several other travel companies, a major financial services organization, and a media provider; a spokesperson for ABTA also confirmed that their legal head attended the meeting.

This consortium may soon include other major brand names; Saga, Tesco, Lastminute.com and Arcadia (owner of TopShop) would not confirm being a part of the meeting, but will state that they are considering their legal position.

However, the lawsuits have already begun: last week Teletext Holidays started proceedings against Directline Holidays for trademark infringement, claiming the rival company had bid “Teletext” as a search term on paid listings through Google.

Google declined to comment, and a spokesperson announced that they are unaware of any such legal action.

The situation in the US has sparked several lawsuits over the last few years, with the general consensus being that while companies can bid for their competitors’ keywords to be used in paid search, it is infringement to use the keywords obtained for advertising purposes. Misrepresentation or fraudulent intent has been an issue in the past, with similar spellings or partial phrases being used to dupe consumers to an alternate destination.

It will be seen whether the action Google has taken to align the UK market under the same guidelines as the US will hurt the search engine’s advertising market across the water.