Do you use Google Adwords? If so, do you use other people’s trademarks to target your ads? If so, you are not alone.
A case in the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is currently considering the controversial use of company names and trademarks in internet advertising searches. The ECJ case has been brought by Louis Vuitton, Viaticum SA and the owners of the Eurochallenges brand. Each argues that their trademarks rights are infringed when other businesses use their names and trademarks as triggers for their Google Adwords ads.
A ruling is expected sometime in February, but the likely outcome is that Google’s service and behaviour is legal and does NOT infringe trademark rights.
Google has released a statement: “We believe that consumers are smart and are not confused when they see a variety of ads displayed in response to their search queries.”
Most internet marketers must hope that Google will win the case so that they can continue to use other people’s company names and trademarks as Adwords triggers.
If you have read any of the internet marketing forums lately, quite a few people seem to have problems keeping their Google AdSense accounts: there seem to be numerous claims of Google banning them apparently for no reason.
Google is a commercial company and as such exists to make money. It seems very unlikely to me that Google would withdraw an AdSense account for no reason. However, it seems very likely that an AdSense account would be withdrawn if the holder of the account failed to comply with Google’s AdSense terms and conditions.
It seems to me that there are three key areas of the terms and conditions that you just must understand and comply with to avoid being banned:
- Avoid prohibited website subjects
- Don’t click on your own ads
- Don’t ask people to click on your ads
Avoid banned website subjects
Many people seem to be under the misconception that once they have a Google AdSense account they can place ads on any web page they like. This is not the case. The Google AdSense terms and conditions prohibit certain categories of website from taking part in the program. These categories include the obvious such as websites promoting: use of illegal drugs; pirate software; racism; etc. However, other less obvious categories are also prohibited, such as those promoting beer and other alcoholic drinks.
Don’t click on your own ads
Clicking on ads on your own website is forbidden expressly by the Google AdSense terms and conditions. It is probably the quickest way to get banned from Google AdSense. NEVER click on your own ads. You might think that you are clever enough to fool Google’s click fraud system but you probably aren’t.
If you do click on one of the ads on your own website, in the first instance, Google will probably just give you zero credit for the click – I guess that they accept that accidents do happen. You could get banned for the second offence – Google, quite rightly, takes this form of click fraud very seriously.
Don’t ask people to click on your ads
This “rule” falls into two parts: on website; and off website.
If you design your website in such a way that people are encouraged to click on the Google ads, either directly or indirectly, your Google AdSense account will almost certainly get banned sooner or later. Some people do actually use words like “Click here” just above ads. Google does not allow this; they do not allow slightly more subtle wordings either if the wording encourages website visitors to click on ads.
Perhaps less surprising is the fact that huge numbers of people believe that they can ask friends and relatives, off line, to click on their ads. I guess that this would work in a limited way on a very small scale, but Google clearly has sophisticated systems to track click fraud. To make more than $100 per month out of AdSense you will need a couple of thousand clicks a month – those clicks must come from different computers and different people! There is no way you can generate a decent income without creating a good website with a great SEO campaign.
To make money out of Google AdSense you need to build a viable AdSense website that complies with the Google AdSense terms and conditions. If you have any doubts about what you are doing, contact Google and ask them about it. Don’t risk wasting all the time effort and money that you have put into building and promoting the website simply because you haven’t read the terms and conditions properly.
If you do get banned, there are alternatives to Google AdSense, but I have yet to find an alternative that is anywhere near as good.
Like many bloggers, I am being targeted increasingly by comment spammers. Comment spammers identify popular blogs and then post comments that (usually) have nothing to do with the blog post that they are commenting on. The primary aim of the comment spammers is to build links to their websites. They hope to gain some traffic for their websites too.
I have always moderated comments so my live blog is not polluted with the comment spammers’ trash. However, comment spammers frequently use automated ‘bots’ with the result that a huge number of spam comments can appear in a very short period of time. Having to review a hundred comments a day became too much for me so I looked for a solution.
Most of the comments that I really disliked had 20 or 30 links in them so I looked for a WordPress plugin that would limit the number of links allowed in a comment. I found ‘Link Limits’ by James McKay.
Link Limits is a WordPress plugin that rejects comments outright if they contain more than two hyperlinks, or if they contain any hyperlinks at all in BBCode format. It also displays a short note on your comment form advising your visitors that you have these restrictions in place. If you want to change the number of hyperlinks that you allow in comments, or ban them completely, you can edit the plugin file. If you want to allow unlimited hyperlinks and just check for BBCode, you can do that too.
Link Limits has made reviewing comments much much quicker and I think that it is very unlikely that it has caught any legitimate comments.
James described the plugin as “1.0 alpha 1″ and says that it has been tested on WordPress 2.1.2 and 2.2 and “is expected to work on all versions of WordPress >= 2.0.” I have not encountered any problems with it on WordPress 2.9.1. If comment spammers are causing you problems, why not give it a try.
Happy New Year.
Do you know what the top 10 New Year’s Resolutions are? If you don’t, you can probably guess but I have included them below just in case.
1. Spend more time with family and friends
2. Improve fitness
3. Lose weight
4. Stop smoking
5. Enjoy life more
6. Cut down drinking
7. Pay off debts
8. Learn a new skill
9. Volunteer to help other people
10. Get organized
You are probably too late to use them in your internet marketing this year but think about them for 2011 – they generate a huge volume of internet searches and thus are ideal for niche marketing. However, don’t just go for weight loss, for example. Find a sub-niche that does not have so much competition.
But, of course, the internet marketer’s new year’s resolution should be something like “don’t put off until tomorrow what can be done today”. If you don’t take action you can’t make money online!
According to the WordPress website there have been more than one million downloads of WordPress 2.9. Unfortunately, WordPress 2.9 contained a couple of bugs that affected scheduled posts and pingbacks - basically on some systems (including mine) scheduled posts did not get posted and pingbacks did not work too well.
WordPress 2.9.1 has now been released to fix these and a number of other more minor issues.
See the WordPress announcement for more information.
There are occasions when you need to surf online anonymously. This may be for a variety of quite legitimate reasons. For example, Google know so much about you and your computer connection, even if you are not logged into a Google account, the search results that are served up are biased towards your physical location and preferences. Sometimes you want differently biased results – totally unbiased results are probably no longer possible.
I have recently come across a piece of software that protects your web browsing by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all over the world. This system prevents anyone who is watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. The software is called ‘Tor’ and it works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.
For web browsing, there is a Tor bundle that integrates very neatly with Firefox.
For more information, take a look at the Tor website.
If you have not already updated to WordPress 2.9 you may wish to hold off for a short while. The recent 2.9 release triggered a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension. With these versions of curl, scheduled posts and pingbacks are not processed correctly. WordPress 2.9.1 will be released shortly to fix this problem as well as a handful of other, lesser issues.
The WordsPress team have released the first beta version of WordPress 2.9.1 so that the various fixes can be tested on a wide range of platforms.
See the WordPress announcement for more information.
The next version of WordPress, 2.9, has been released. It has been named “Carmen” in honor of jazz vocalist Carmen McRae. New features include:
- Global undo/”trash” feature - if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can now retrieve it.
- Built-in image editor - you can crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images.
- Batch plugin update and compatibility checking - update up to 10 plugins at once and check whether your plugins are compatible with new releases of WordPress.
- Easier video embeds - just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code.
- and more.
For more information, take a look at the WordPress release announcement.
This last week has seen the first “major” snowfalls in the UK this winter. Predictably, the various organizations responsible for keeping the country moving have failed, yet again. Some roads have been gritted and salted, but many have not. In general, trains worked OK, except for Eurostar who had “the wrong sort of snow”. Airports also failed to cope with the weather.
Pre-Christmas snow
Many of you outside the UK probably assume that we had a couple of feet of snow without warning. But no. A couple of inches of well forecast snow caused complete chaos in many areas.
We see interviews on television. Apparently, everyone is to blame for the various problems, except for the organizations themselves.
I saw an interview with one official who said that the problem with the gritting in his area was that there was too much traffic on the roads to lay grit and salt, but in the next sentence, he said that there was not enough traffic on the roads to make the salt work properly. I worked out what he meant but he was trying to put the wrong message across and not succeeding at that.
Have we learnt any lessons? Probably not. It will probably happen all over again in less than two months time.
On that “happy” note, let me wish you all best wishes for Christmas.
The UK Government has finally found a way to tax the Internet (but missed the target). This new tax has been on the cards for some time now but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, confirmed the introduction of the tax in his pre-budget report last week.
The new tax will be levied at a rate of £0.50 (+VAT) per month on all fixed phone lines. The stated purpose of the tax is to help develop future superfast broadband networks. Mr Darling expects the tax to raise about £175 million per year, thus enabling next generation broadband services to reach 90% of the UK population by the end of 2017.
In his speech, Mr Darling said:
“Mr Speaker, we are modernising the UK’s digital infrastructure and, in the process, creating thousands more skilled jobs. We have provided funding to help extend the opportunities of the broadband network to more remote communities.
We now want to go further, so we can provide the next generation of super-fast broadband to 90 per cent of the population by the end of 2017. This will be funded through a duty of 50 pence a month on landlines which will be included in the Finance Bill.”
Concerns have already been raised about the government’s intentions. For example:
- Will the tax be withdrawn in 2017 or will it become like road tax, i.e., not all spent on roads?
- Why is VAT to be levied on top of the tax? (Because, technically, it’s a duty not a tax!)
- Who will the monies raised be distributed to?
- How do you define a fixed telephone line?
- What happens if (when) the tax is not enough?
The Conservatives have vowed to scrap the tax if they win the next election, so it may not be around for too long. However, if they do scrap it, the tax will probably cost more money to implement than it will actually raise.
Oh dear!
December 16th, 2009 in
Internet Marketing | tags:
tax |
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