Google revises SA trademark policy

Google's trademark complaint investigations will no longer result in the search engine giant monitoring or restricting keywords for ads served to users in South Africa, it was announced earlier this week. The change, which will also affect many other regions across the world, will come into force 4 June 2009.

6 May 2009

Commented Ben Novick, advertising communications and public affairs manager EMEA, Google UK, “Google's goal is to provide our users with the most relevant information, from both search results and advertising. We are making this change because we want to give users greater choices to help them make informed decisions."

According to Google, it will make it possible for more relevant ads to appear in the sponsored links after a user has typed in a search query using a trademarked term.

The change means:

a user typing in a trademarked keyword into the search box will now be presented with more relevant ads in the sponsored links section, giving them greater choice;
a company advertising on Google.co.za will now be able to select trademarked terms as keywords; and
SA will be brought into line with the US, Canada, UK and Ireland, which has already adopted this policy.

Note, however, that Google's ads text policy remains unchanged - unauthorised advertisers will not be able to use a monitored trademarked term in their ad text. This trademark policy change only affects keywords.

This change affects the regions listed at https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=144298. The policy in other regions remains unchanged: selecting monitored trademarks as keywords will not be allowed.