I guess it's unlikely you'll ever find yourself in legal trouble for advertising using other people's trademarks, as Google will just reject the advertising. However, if you're running your own AdWords campaign and are targeting competitors, it might be worth taking a look at your strategy. We don't tend to do this for our clients anyway, as it's expensive – Google gives you a rotten "Quality Score" if your ads and landing page don't mention the trademark in question. If you own any trademarks though, and find competitive ads appearing when you search for those trademarks in Google, you may now be able to put a stop to the practice.

Clear the ads off those searches for your trademarks

If it's a very large site, there's a strong possibility that quite a few will be missing. Every site has an "indexation cap" based on factors such as PageRank, "Trust", server speed and duplicate content issues. If you've reached that limit, you need to take action. What you don't want to do is to wait for Google to get around to finding unindexed important pages. If it hasn't found them already, they're probably awkward to find and there's no reason to assume they'll appear any time soon. Google needs some encouragement.

A nice technique to set about this task is outlined in Using multiple sitemaps to analyse indexation on large sites on Blogstorm. This suggests breaking the sitemap into multiple files, and examining the results from each to see where the problem might be. As it concludes, "Once you can diagnose exactly the type of pages that Google doesn’t want to index you can fix the issue by improving PageRank flow to those pages and adding more unique content."

Using Webmaster Tools to find what's not indexed

The subject is discussed in more depth in Evaluating long tail opportunities on Blogstorm.

I shouldn't let the opportunity pass to remind you that we offer AdWords management services here at Business Marketing Online, and we do it on a fixed-cost-per-click basis, which industrial companies seem much more at home with. Also, you pay us for the campaign in a conventional invoiced manner once a month, rather than having to pay Google through a credit card. Contact Tony here for details.

How to find interesting, relevant search terms cheaply

If you type in a two-word query into Google, the search engine will return a list of pages which feature both words. For each page, you'll see the title, and under that, a couple of lines of text. If the two words are in close proximity on the page, those two lines of text will be a "snippet" from the page which contains the two words. (Our Insider Programme members know all about manipulating this text).

However, if the two words are a fair distance apart on the page, the descriptive text will have two shorter "snippets" (one for each word), separated by an ellipsis ("…"). Read together, this could imply a whole new meaning to what's actually on the page.

Nobody is suggesting that we should be responsible for our Google results resulting from strange two-word queries. However, it would appear that in the Dutch case, the problem was that the company didn't take steps to get things changed when a complaint was received. This could happen to any of us – and would you know what to do if it did?

Can you get your Google results changed quickly?

Why there are no runners-up prizes in Google