Google receives support from EU Judge in trademark infringement case

At least three major brands including LVMH, parent company of Louis Vuitton, launched a trademark infringement case against Google in French Courts.

Google received a massive boost in its case against the parent company of Louis Vuitton when a senior EU judge, in his legal opinion, said Google can allow trademark names to be used in its AdWords. Advocate General Poiares Maduro said in a statement: "The mere display of relevant sites in response to keywords is not enough to establish a risk of confusion on the part of consumers as to the origin of goods or services."

The French Court ruled in favour of the brands asking Google to halt the usage of trademark names in its searches. The case has been taken to the European Court of Justice and the legal opinion by the senior judge could provide Google an edge in the case.

The long-running legal dispute will not be ruled on officially until early next year, although this non-binding legal opinion is likely to carry a good deal of weight.

The companies accuse Google of allowing trademark keywords to be used in its AdWords system. This allows manufacturers of fake and replica products to place advertisements and sell non-original products.

The AdWords has a big contribution towards Google's revenue pie and the search giant posted a net advertisement revenue of $21 billion in 2008.

Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking.

You can now hear it from the man himself at Google. This is not breaking news, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of value into this.

Optimizing for Bing

if Yahoo is driving a significant traffic to your site, you need to determine what keywords you rank well for in Yahoo, but not in Bing. you need to work on raising these bing rankings.

Bing returns the top five results for the primary keyword you entered, then displays the top three results for up to five related terms, providing a list of 20 possible listings for the user to select. If you currently rank 6-10 for any of these keywords you should work on building links to move up into the top five, and focus on achieving top three results for the terms that Bing has chosen for the Quick Tabs.

What does Bing Look for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. Here they are:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don't seek links from sites whose content isn't worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text