Are you are aware of brand bidding? Is someone surfing off your brand on Google Search? Don’t know what I’m talking about?

Try the following >

1. Enter the name of your company into Google Search.
2. Get your colleagues and friends in other countries to do the same.
3. Check your search results – you should be top of the organic search results, right
4. Notice any paid or sponsored ads appearing above or to the right of your search results?
5. Are they by any chance promoting one of your competitors?

What you are witnessing is brand bidding. The example I’ve used in the presentation at the bottom of the post shows very clearly what is happenning – check out the ads on the right-hand side.

Brand bidding or surfing is an increasing phenomenon in search marketing, especially in crowded markets. Search engines positively weight the authority of a long-established website. So any brand that has been active on the Internet for over ten years will be granted some authority by the web crawlers. What new brands always lack by default is visibility and awareness. As we all know, both of these take time and money to build up and in the world of translation especially, reputations can be won and lost over night.

So why not take a shortcut and slipstream off another brand? Open your store next to Nike, M&S or Mango and you are bound to get some passing traffic courtesy of their pulling power. The concept is quite seductive, is it not?

Here at Wordbank we’ve only really started noticing this in the past year, mainly because we’ve started taking search marketing (and other inbound marketing techniques) very seriously.

As I mentioned in the Search Me! Session at the GALA Lisbon conference on 29 March, paid search can be an expensive business. Like a casino, the house always wins. In this case Baidu, Yandex and Google get that little bit richer every time you and I launch a new campaign or up our PPC bid.

However, it is clear from our research on our own Translation and Localization market that those competitors who are savvy and got in early have established a strong presence and authority on the web, as a result of continuous activity. Brand bidding is just one of search marketing’s low hanging fruit, if also one of several rather murky practices.

Way back in December 2008 a story broke about how Interflora was taking legal action against Marks & Spencer for bidding on the keyword “interflora” using Google AdWords. The story has received lots of mainstream coverage over the past two years, with even the BBC picking up on it last October.

On 24 March 2011, the EU Advocate General issued his opinion on the matter and found in favour of Interflora. If the Court of Justice of the European Union follows the recommendation of the Advocate General (which happens in the majority of cases) then this case could well result in the end of trademark bidding across the EU.

The operative or killer clause in this ruling is:

– An error concerning the origin of goods or services arises when the competitor’s sponsored link is liable to lead some members of the public to believe that the competitor is a member of the trade mark proprietor’s commercial network when it is not. As a result of this the trade mark proprietor has the right to prohibit the use of the keyword in advertising by the competitor in question.

Everyone who has a brand can and should defend against this dubious activity and that’s not so difficult if you put a little time and effort into Paid Search. After all, if someone is searching on your brand, your site should be the most relevant and at the very least you should be optimising around your own brand.

Here is a good guide on when and where to defend against brand bidding.

Figure.1 Google Brand Bidding Example.