Google Suggest Now Helps Prevent Trademark Poaching

…at least to a degree (and this is good to see).

Back in May of this year when Google Suggest got links to the main/official websites added to the lists of suggested search phrases, I am pretty positive they did not have affiliate marketing in mind. The feature was certainly mainly geared towards to the end users, but it appears to help merchants prevent affiliates (as well as competitors) from poaching their trademarks through Google AdWords.

For example, if before May 2009 we searched Google for “Cabelas”, we’d get the following suggested key(words)/(phrases) shown to us:

Now the suggestions look as follows:

From the above image, it is obvious that Google Suggest puts the original website on the very top position, and all paid search ads (which are bidding on the keyword in the search field) on the bottom of the list. Ideally, for the purposes of preventing trademark poaching on this level, paid ads should have been excluded altogether. But since, as stated at the outset, trademark poaching was unlikely the primary concern of Google, it’s good to see that PPC ads are at least pushed down to the very bottom.