Are you one of the many businesses that have a registered trademark on your products, services, or company name? In case you didn’t already know, Google doesn’t actually register trademarks.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to request an investigation of infringement by advertisers outside of the ones you authorize.

Listen, trademarking is an expensive and time-consuming process.

One of our many duties here at Direct Online Marketing is to address any infringement upon our clients’ trademarks in Google Ads by alerting clients to another company’s use of their trademarks in search engine results pages.

Let’s take a few minutes below to discuss the tools at hand to properly file a formal complaint against advertisers with Google when we find unauthorized trademarks in ad text.

Who Can File A Google Ads Trademark Complaint?

• The owner of the trademark
• An attorney of record listed on the trademark registration
• A representative of the trademark owner based at a parent company headquarters (think a brand manager, product marketer, or communications director)
• Someone the trademark owner has notified Google has the authorization to act on their behalf
• Other associated parties (for instance, a Google Premier Partner advertising agency)

Want a Premier Google Partner’s
help filing your trademark complaint?
Call 800.979.3177 today.

How Do You File A Google Ads Trademark Complaint?

Google makes this process pretty straightforward. Below is a four-step process for submitting a trademark complaint in Google Ads if you believe another advertiser is in violation of the Google trademark infringement policy.

1. Review The Google Advertising Policy Guidelines

Review Google’s Advertising Policies. Note that their trademark policy varies by region, so please review them closely if you feel your brand has fallen victim to this, especially in a country represented in the European Union or the European Free Trade Association.

2. Produce Proof Of Another Advertiser Misusing Your Trademark

Locate an example of where someone is misusing your trademark. If it’s a national issue, you can do this just by doing a search on google.com. If it’s a localized issue and outside of your area, you can use Ads’ Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to mimic any location.

To use this tool:

1. Click the Tools tab
2. Under Troubleshooting, click “Ad preview and diagnosis”
3. Enter your trademark term. Select location, language, device, and audience type (if necessary).
4. Press enter to create the search result preview box and scroll down.

Before you go too far through this process, it’s worth noting that a reseller and informational site that uses this information may be protected against any kind of infringement action if:

• The landing page of their ad is meant to sell the products and services that use the trademark
• The landing page is found to simply provide information or specific details related to the trademark

3. Collect Your Trademark Infringement Information In A Google Sheets Document

Create a Google Sheets doc or excel spreadsheet. This is just for your own internal use, but we find it extremely helpful.

Below is an example of kinds of information you will want to have on hand in case you need to send more information.

• Date Sent
• Date Received Reply
• Search Engine – if using different search engines
• Status: Removed or Not?
• AIMS Service Ticket or # – this will be the number to refer to when communicating with Google
• Site Owner / Search Term
• Ad Displayed (text version)
• Display URL
• Destination URL – copy the destination URL by right-clicking onto the ad’s headline
• Location (ex. Washington, DC)
• Screenshot the Ad – this is not always necessary, but helpful when Google responds asking for it (which they often do)

4. Complete The Google Ads Trademark Complaint Form

Fill out the Google Trademark Complaint form.

You will be required to fill out the form and submit for review. The form is self-explanatory, but you will need specific information in order to complete the process. Most importantly, you will need to know the following:

• Ads Account #
• Trademark owner’s name, address, phone, and email
• Countries where the term is trademarked
• Registered status (yes or no)
• Whether the trademark is on a word, design, or both
• Application or Registration #
• Your name
• Title
• Company Name
• Relationship (ex. trademark owner or advertising agency that is authorized to act on your behalf)
• Address
• Phone #
• Email

Please note, the Google complaint form is ordered differently than above. You will be asked a few additional questions, which is where the spreadsheet will then be put to good use. You will also need to describe specific details concerning the “Scope of complaint” and select either only specific advertisers or all advertisers. Once you are finished filling out the form, click submit.

Next Steps Following Your Submission Of A Trademark Infringement Complaint

A Google representative will notify you that the complaint has been received; the issue will then be investigated. You may need to provide Google with additional information such as a screenshot (as you are not able to input an image into the complaint form).

That’s it. Pretty simple and quick.

Running through this process 3 times a week allows you to stay on top of competitor ads that could potentially limit your ads from showing. Most importantly, this small task will help prevent a company from gaining value from your trademarked term.

For other options on how to respond when a competitor targets your brand name with their PPC and SEO strategies, we strongly suggest you check out our post on responding to competitors who target your brand name.

For more on trademarks and other legality related to SEO and advertising in search engines, please check out any of the following:

• Want Approval For Resellers And Partners To Use Your Trademark In Google Ads?
• Google Now In Legitimate Trouble over Trademarks
• You Can Use Competitor’s Brands in PPC, But Do You Want To?
• How SEOs Can Protect Themselves Legally

Key Takeaways on Trademark Infringement in Google Ads

• Google allows advertisers to bid on competitors’ trademarked terms as keywords; however, the use of trademarks in ad copy is restricted without authorization.
• Trademark owners can file a complaint with Google to prevent unauthorized use of their trademark in competitor ads.
• To protect your trademark, you need to have it registered in the relevant territory and provide evidence of infringement when submitting a complaint to Google.
• Monitoring your brand terms regularly is key to protecting your trademark and maintaining control over your brand visibility in search.

If you’re interested in learning how you can drive better results with search engine marketing, schedule a digital marketing consultation.

This article was updated to add additional information on May 5th, 2025.

The post How to Protect Your Brand From Trademark Infringement In Google Ads (Updated 2025) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Since then, digital marketers near and far have treated his comments as the gospel of the impact of social media on SEO. Whether in digital marketing trade publications or forums, Cutts’ sentiment/clarification has served as the go-to source for clarity.

But did he tell the truth? Or did we fail to interpret him correctly?

First, watch and listen to what Cutt’s says in the now-infamous video, “Are pages from social media sites ranked differently?”.

He seems honest enough, right?

Yet discord remains because other evidence counters Cutts’ denial that social media activity has an impact on SEO. In 2018, a Hootsuite experiment determined that successful social media campaigns encourage higher search result rankings. The experiment displayed a solid trendline favoring increased SEO rankings on social media posts with higher social engagement. Even now, in 2020, the number of social media platforms is higher than ever.

The confusion over the SEO and social media relationship stymies SEO optimizers. The fact is, social media labor is hardly a trivial endeavor. It’s work (and lots of it). It’s another wing of your digital marketing business that requires energy, focus, and possibly financing.

Who wants to spend more money and more brainpower on a mere promise of improved search exposure?

Well, maybe we are looking at this wrong.

Let’s break that down.

The Impact of Social Media on SEO

It’s important to understand from the outset that although Google’s communications over its ranking factors feel more affable these days, they still remain dutifully protective over the machine’s nucleus.

Hence, no matter how friendly Google’s outreach seems, it remains an Exacto knife slicing precisely at definitive, purposeful lines that conceal information that might lead to search marketing fraud.

In other words, listen to Google execs and consider the provided nuggets, but keep the salt on hand.

Let’s consider the exact exchange between Cutts and a digital marketer named Ryan from Michigan.

“Are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm? How much do they matter?”

First, Cutts notes that Facebook and Twitter both are crawlable web properties in equal capacity with the rest of the web. This implies that a link on Facebook could be a prompt to index a page. Clearly, using Google Console and appropriate site map application, a marketer can prompt a crawl by Google’s bots.

What Cutts means is that Facebook is no different than any other website. If you are linked on a website that gets crawled by Google bot, chances are, your link will experience a crawl.

So that’s definitely not saying that Facebook or social media fuel any added SEO benefits.

Maybe there’s more to the story

So what then did Cutts say in his answer that’s now become controversial marketing lore?

“But as far as doing any special work to say that you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithm.

Let me talk a little bit about why not.

We have to crawl the web in order to find pages on those two web properties. And um, we’ve had at least one experience where we were blocked from crawling for about a month and a half. And so the idea of doing a lot of special engineering work to try to extract some data from web pages when we might get blocked from being able to crawl those web pages in the future is something where the engineers would be a little bit leary about doing that.

It’s also tricky because Google crawls the web and as we crawl the web, we are sampling the web at finite periods of time…we’re crawling and fetching a particular web page. And so if we’re fetching a particular web page we know what it said at one point in time but something on that page could change. Someone could change the relationship status or someone could block a follower. So, it would be a little unfortunate if we tried to extract some data from the pages that we crawled and we, later on, found out, that for example, a wife had blocked an abusive husband or something like that and just because we happened to crawl it at the exact moment when those two profiles were linked, we started to return pages we’d crawled.

So, because we are sampling an imperfect web, we have to worry a lot about identity when identity is already hard.”

Breaking Down Cutts’ Social Media and SEO Relationship

At first read (or listen), it sure feels as though Cutts drives home an ironclad SEO principle that Google does not algorithmically consider social signals in rankings.

It feels this way because it’s exactly what he said.

But when we consider anecdotal evidence and the Hootsuite research cited early, things seem murky.

They aren’t murky at all.

What Cutts stated and what evidence reveals aren’t mutually exclusive.

Cutts explicitly states that Google’s algorithm doesn’t leverage social signals for ranking purposes. Social signals are LIKEs, follows, comments, etc. He reasons that doing so exposes users to privacy risks and opens Google’s search ranking algorithm to unreliable data. Cutts mentions that a social network blocked Google’s bots (or so he implies).

He’s not wrong

In 2019, Apple blocked Google from running it’s internal iOS. This caused disruptions for Google, which Apple accused of being in violation of TOS. The debate of who’s right between two tech giants aside, the block is case and point for Cutts’ perceived concerns.

From all this, we can surmise that Cutts may well be telling the truth on the point that Google algorithms don’t consider social engagements, which are typically proprietary of the social network.

But does that also mean that social media doesn’t help SEO?

According to the fallout headlines that followed Cutts’ 2014 video, you’d certainly think so.

Here’s an article from the highly-followed SEO Roundtable published in 2016, two years following Cutts’ social media/SEO clarifications.

The headline accurately reflects Cutts’ statements over the matter, but it doesn’t tell the entire story.

No, Google algorithm doesn’t consider social media engagement when it ranks a website page.

That’s fair.

But the question is, does social media success influence search rankings?

Let’s explore.

Social Media and SEO: We’re Missing The Forest For The Trees

Here’s the argument in live-action:

“Well, when a link I post on Facebook gets tons of shares, that article always seems to rank higher on Google.”

“That can’t be true, Matt Cutts says social media doesn’t influence SEO.”

“OK, I guess I’m just lucky a lot.”

Now’s not the time to buy a lottery ticket, unless you were already planning to do so. You probably aren’t ‘lucky’ if you’re highly shared or liked content performs better in Google search, it’s most likely just part of the web’s funnel of broad success.

Let’s use email newsletters as an example. Newsletter marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach consumers.

Newsletter marketing compliments SEO because it promotes the sharing of content, which in turn, is the very core of backlink building.

Social Media Helps Promote SEO Backlinks

In SEO, you need high-quality, reader-worthy content. And you need high-authority backlinks. It’s a quandary, to say the least. You can pay top dollar for content, but good luck on the backlinks.

The idea is that powerful content synergistically promotes backlinks. If your article is the source or authority on a subject or offering thought leadership, other site owners may link to it. This is a natural SEO trigger for ranking, no one argues that. When quality content is backlinked from quality websites, you’ll likely rank higher in Google.

Let’s approach this in a common-sense way.

If you post your article, “Build a Garden That Provides Year-Round Food.” That article garners 5,500 shares in the first two days on Facebook.

That’s a viral article.

Two things happen in this scenario

1. The article is exposed to web users at a high pace.
2. The article is likely considered an authority, or high-quality, or worth sharing. When you combine both points 1 and 2, we realize that a great article is being seen by a massive audience. If it’s great, those who are exposed to it are more likely to share it. If it’s good and seen by lots of people, it’s likely to be shared even more.

It’s a perfect sharing storm. The increase in eyeballs accumulates more shares. That’s a data-driven synergy playing out. More shares = more exposure = more backlinks.

How do we define a ‘share?’

If an article is shared 5,000 times, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that it was also shared on blogs?

An SEO strategy doesn’t have to include social media, but the two platforms work rather harmoniously together, including in the reverse.

Let’s say your article ranks in the top spot of a meaningful keyword. You get 2,000 hits per day from that one ranking alone. If you have social media sharing, that can give people the opportunity to consistently share your page across their personal networks. This adds to the traffic bucket, but it also helps fuel more backlinks.

So Yes, Social Media Influences SEO Rankings

When we avoid sweeping interpretations of Matt Cutts’ 2014 statements regarding social media influences on SEO, we understand that aspects of the social media/SEO relationship certainly help encourage improved rankings. The Internet’s original interpretation of Cutts’ synopsis soured SEO marketers’ perspective on the social media space. But evidence and common sense certainly provide solid reasoning to include social media in a comprehensive SEO strategy.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post What is the Social Media Impact on SEO? Decoding Matt Cutts’ 2014 Response (Updated August 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

What is Google BERT?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and acts as Google’s AI center for natural language processing. Like RankBrain, BERT utilizes machine learning to better understand queries from a contextual standpoint. However, BERT takes Google’s natural understanding of language to the next level.

Google can already understand synonyms, misspellings and common phrases. Now, with BERT, Google is able to understand language nuances and idiosyncrasies in order to return even more relevant search results. BERT builds on RankBrain and the two work together to create a powerful AI capable of understanding language and context at near-human levels.

How BERT Will Impact the SERPs

Google’s announcement indicated that BERT will be applied on a query-by-query basis, affecting one in ten search queries on average. This still represents a massive number of results, which means businesses should be prepared to see significant shifts in rankings over the coming weeks.

BERT will impact both organic results and featured snippets, altering current rankings to better fit with contextual relevance and user intent. Google was kind enough to present us with a few examples of how users will see the change. In the sample below, BERT is able to understand how the word “to” interacts with the other keywords in the query, and presents information specifically on coming to America, rather than information on travel in either direction.

What does this mean? For searchers, it means less scrolling, bouncing, and follow up searches before they find the content they really want.

For businesses producing content, it means pieces with a highly targeted angle on a topic have a great chance to come up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) for the most relevant keywords, especially for long-tail keyword phrases.

Google BERT and International SEO

BERT also brings Google’s understanding of language across language barriers. With BERT, the search engine is able to take its discoveries about the context in one language and apply them to other languages– for example, taking what it’s learned about prepositions in English, and applying that to conjugations in Italian or French.

We asked Adam Roth, our Director of Growth & Analysis, for his input on this development. “This is important because it will enable Google to better comprehend the semantics of long-tail searches.”

Roth, who studied machine learning and natural language processing for 5+ years as a research assistant for Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, has worked on advanced analytics projects for organizations like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs prior to joining the team at DOM.

“Previously, this information was separated due to the language barrier and inconsistencies in entity – entity identity across databases. In essence: this update will make Google much smarter,” he added.

While Google has, in the past, been hampered by a lack of algorithmic understanding of international languages, BERT will help close the language divide, ensuring the best results for searchers across the world.

What You Can Do

For website owners and editors, BERT is the line in the sand between the old way of doing SEO, focusing only on keywords, and more natural, big-picture SEO techniques that put an emphasis on linguistic nuance and content quality.

“From an on-page SEO and keyword optimization perspective, we’ve seen great results for clients in visibility and traffic growth when we apply conversational phrases like ‘near me’ to location-based pages or ‘what is’ to blog posts and articles,” said Jonathan Bentz, one of our Senior Digital Marketing Strategists.

“Previous to the BERT update, we would have put less emphasis on prepositions and small language nuances. While we will use these phrases strategically, reducing their emphasis won’t be a best practice for us moving forward.”

While Google (as usual) states that there’s nothing you can do to “win” after this update, what we’re seeing is huge growth for clients who use prepositions, conversational phrases and cultural vernacular.

When looking at your website’s Titles, Meta Descriptions, Image Alternative Texts, and page copy, now is the time to take into account how your keyphrases interact with one another. Consider the intent behind the content of each page: the questions you answer, the information you serve, and the interactive abilities of each URL. Then, imagine the user intent behind your target keywords, and take time to look at the impact of each word in the keyphrase, to better understand the intent behind the query string as a whole.

Remember, as Google becomes more adept at understanding language, the user experience becomes more about conversation than simple question-and-answer.

The end result? Despite, or perhaps because of AI, the future of search is more human than ever.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post The Google BERT Update: Context is More Important than Ever appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

She works for a big international company and uses the computer all day, however, didn’t know how to utilize Google for anything more than a quick search. She was amazed at all of the things that Google could do and the different ways to search. She stayed interested and continued to ask questions while at the same time inspiring my newest blog topics: Get to Know Google.

Since beginning my career with Direct Online Marketing, I have learned so many things about Google that I never knew existed and now I want to share them with you. Going forward when I post to our digital marketing blog, I will share some of the great features of Google Search, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics.

Google Search & Search Operators

Let’s start with Google Search, the most common of Google functions. Here in 2015, most people already know how to conduct an average search to locate a website they are looking for. However, Google actually has several different types of search operators (modifiers) that can help you pin point exactly what you are looking for. Below I will explain and show you a few examples of what I mean.

Site Search (site:example.com)

As an SEO the most basic and most commonly used search operator is the site: operator which allows us to see the total number of pages that Google has indexed for a website.

Keyword + Site Search

While that may only excite my fellow SEO’s, let me show you some ways to use these search operators in your everyday life. You can use a site: operator to actually locate specific content within a website. Simply enter the keyword followed by site:example.com.

The very first organic result will take you directly to the topic within the site that you are looking for. This is not only a time saver, it can also eliminate a bulk of your bookmarks.

Name + Site Search

This awesome feature also works with names, enabling you to locate content within the site either about or by a specific person. This can help you quickly find an employee biography or maybe your favorite blogger within an organization.

So, did you know Google was so smart? You can actually let you imagination run wild with this search function. Think how quickly you could locate things on large sites, an iPhone on Amazon or hard to find collectibles on EBay…The possibilities are endless!

Image/Video + Site Search

Are you more of a visual person? Do you prefer to shop or locate information by scanning through pictures or even video rather than a bunch of search results? Well, you’re in luck! You can conduct any of the searches that I just listed and then click on the images tab or the video tab to get all pictures and videos on that site and relevant to your keyword. Go ahead, I know you’re dying to try it, I’ll wait.

In the meantime I’ll show you an example of looking for National Geographic Articles about Africa. When you have located an image of interest, simply click on it and it will give you the option to visit the page, in just 2 clicks you have found your article of interest. The videos tab will do the same thing, except it will simply pull all the videos within the site about Africa.

That’s all, for now, I hope that you learned a thing or two about search operators and how to use them in your everyday life. I’m excited to hear about any searches or combination of searches that you conduct, so feel free to share in the comments.

See you on the next edition of Get to Know Google!

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

The post Get to Know Google: Site Search appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.