Google sued over parked pages
Read an article about Google being sued over facilitating trademark infringement through their Adsense for Domains service.
I am not normally very concerned about trademark infringement as I don’t own any real brands, but I do have at least 2 sights that are huge in PPC where others have jumped in and bought variations of my domain name. Everytime I run a Performance Placement Report and see that i am paying for traffic from these domains it drives me nuts.
This is yet another area where Google is facilitating evil. The Yellow Pages would never have allowed me to advertise Capitol One (O not A in Capital) or Banks Of America and then just redirect the phone number to my own bank. Why is Google willing to allow this. I can somewhat understand the domain service (as much as I hate paying for those low converting clicks) if someone is smart enough to register a common search term as a domain name good for them, that would be the Yellow Page equivalent of calling your law firm DUI Lawyers or Emergency Plumbing Repair. But when someone comes along and just blatantly steals from a brand or even a non-brand like mine by registering a misspelled version of a brand then that is wrong.
I even know of an instance where we are not allowed to bid on competitors brand names, yet we show up on misspellings of their domain name through the parked pages program. I am not allowed to opt out of the program and I cannot see where my ads are showing up through that program and I cannot filter that page through negative sites options. Basically I am stuck violating a term a term of my affiliate agreement. Was a huge hassle and headache, that Google could easily have resolved by not allowing this junk in the first place.
The fact that Google is willing to help these domainer’s monetize this stuff is the reason the problem exists. If they had no ability to monetize the traffic, then they would not be willing to spend money buying domains to capitalize on this - the bad spelling idiots of the world would then Google the misspelled keyword and likely find the right place, I dont buy the argument that Google is facilitating people finding the site they were looking for by serving ads, because if I type in a misspelled domain name into Google I am very unlikely to get search results for the competition as is common on the misspelling domains.
I feel Google (which has very aggressively protected its own TradeMarks) is clearly on the wrong side and I hope this case helps to increase the quality of the Search Network by removing some of the junk. Best case scenario some judge says “You are serving Search Only ads in an environment where no search has been done?” but I very much doubt that.
