Affiliate Marketing Blog

Here is a simple way to ascertain whether Ebay UK is encroaching on your company trademark or url (website address) or other well known ones that you are aware off.

It’s Quite simple really:

• Step 1: Within Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known charities & then search i.e. www.barnardos.org.uk, there are dozens of them.

• Step 2: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of 10 well known retail or finance or holiday companies i.e. www.butlinsonline.co.uk, again there are hundreds of them.

• Step 3: Into Google UK, type in the URL’s of any sites you have which are popular or other affiliates you are aware of. i.e. one good affiliate site is www.reviewcentre.com

Remember to try the above without the prefix “www.” as well

Please note the results maybe geo-targeted and may not show for your specific location.

Objectives : Observe the number of sponsored ads featuring “Ebay” & even “Ask” encroaching on the owners of those trademarks or intellectual property.Where is the ethics on taking money away from charities?

Spread the word to any companies you work closely with. Because this has been directly addressed with Ebay, as well as Google who in my opinion have the same hypocritical mindset & was also addressed with the affiliate network Commission Junction (as it’s CJ links which are being used at the time of this post).

Yet still none of them have had the decency to address this effectively.

If it’s your company being affected are you too yellow (chicken) to take on Ebay & ask / insist they stop this practice, whether it be them or close associates?

Report Ebay UK to the following:

Advertising Standards Authority, Office of Fair Trading, Trading Standards or the DTI,

or Alternatively send an email to any Newspapers or industry trade magazines like NMA or Revolution then perhaps this may then cease.

They are potentially taking away business & customers away from you !!!

As far as I am aware this hasn’t happened yet. But could it & will they?

The thought only came about because I was using Firefox 1.5, and realised I couldn’t click on Google Adwords adverts from about advert number 4 or 5 onwards. The ad displayed yet wasn’t clickable. This went on for a few weeks until we downloaded Firefox 2, which seemed to have remedied the problem or it could have been coincidence with Google’s Technical team fixing the glitch. Apparently some users reported similar problems in Firefox 2. At first I thought it was either my PC or Norton Internet Security up to it’s funny tricks.

However this got me thinking … How far down the road are Google in developing their own browser? As they seem to be closely aligned with Firefox at this moment in time. Now just imagine the coup Microsoft could pull off if their IE browser by default blocked Google Adwords or Adsense … claiming it’s simply an ad blocker … perfectly legitimate I reckon … That would certainly send revenues plummeting for Google, but would also affect advertisers livelihoods. However it would certainly get advertisers recommending other search engines & perhaps balance the playing field rather the unhealthy dominance Google currently enjoys. The general public need to realise there is more to the internet than just Google.

With regard to this glitch, here’s a little conspiracy for you. Was it an experiment to analyse if it forced users to click higher bidding ads? … if that as the case why not display fewer ads you may ask … or unless was it a way of reducing CTR for those un-clickable ads & thus via quality score increase minimum bid for those lower ads. Anything is possible & then claim afterwards it was a technical hiccup. You cannot put anything past them.

If Internet Explorer did ever decide to Block Google Adwords & Google Adsense, it would be pure poetry.