ad words - a rival site is using MY sitename in its list of words

is this ethical

[Frank_Rizzo]

When searching for the name of my site on google, I find that a rival site is appearing as a google ad. It seems that this rival has used my site name as a keyword.

Is this right? Is it fair?

[web_india]

It's neither ethical nor fair but what could you do ?

just shows that your site's popular though :)

[NFFC]

We always contact the offending site and request that they cease bidding and/or targetting our company name or trademarks. This has never failed to work and we have not yet had the need to resort to legal action.

It is the online equivialent of setting up a burger bar and calling it McDonalds, imho.

The only grey area that we see is if a domain is "keyword otherword", on ad words if they bid on all terms containing "keyword" they will come up for our domain. We haven't attempted to stop this yet but may well try at some point in the future, should be fun!

[mack]

Google themselves where doing this not so long ago with their search applience. Inktomi was displayed within the adwords box.

[NFFC]

>Inktomi was

Pointed out here at WebmasterWorld I believe, it was gone within hours. :)

[mack]

[webmasterworld.com...]

This is the thread about it.

[Frank_Rizzo]

It could be that they have the two seperate syllables as keywords. I tried splitting the key word in two and their add still appears.

I think I'll beat them at their own game and add their site name to my campaign.