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We received a letter from BMW North America last week from their legal department requesting that we change the name of our SEO blog since www.bmwseo.com had their trademark letters in the name.  I was a bit taken back by the letter since this website offers advice and services to BMW dealers which will help them sell more cars.  And since we have BMW dealers as clients, the name was chosen to attract BMW dealers looking for help with their Internet marketing.   So much for that plan, but we have a backup in mind.

I thought about the hundreds of websites that existing that use the letters “BMW” in their domain.  So, I called back the person who wrote the letter and chatted about this matter.  It seems that the letters BMW can be in a sub-directory structure of a URL but not in the URL.  So, www.cars.com/bmw is valid but www.newjerseybmwcars.com is not possible to own unless you are an authorized BMW dealer.   It is not clear whether http://bmw.carsales.com, which is a sub-domain, is permissible.  The letter of the law would indicate it is permissible since it really points to www.carsales.com/bmw

So, I asked about the sheer number of sites on the Internet that use the BMW name that still operate today.  The staff response was that as long as the site was not making profit off the BMW trademark that those sites were tolerated. 

So I brought up and example, a BMW forums called www.bmwzine.com.  Forum websites may look like a non-commercial enterprise but in fact this website is running banner ads and must be collecting advertising revenue.  When I brought this up, I was told that this was a gray area under consideration. 

Without any effort I was able to pull up sites that use the BMW trademark in the URL that are collecting revenue from Google Adwords, Contextual Ads or direct banner ads.  Some were direct retail sites that had no clear relationship to an authorized BMW dealer.  My search revealed sites like:

• www.bmwdirectory.org
• www.ultimate-bmw.com
• www.bmw-forums.net
• www.bmwproblems.com
• www.alloembmwparts.com
• www.advancebmwparts.com

I’m a business owner and I understand the need to protect trademarks so I immediately complied with the request after I did some research on the matter.  The interesting this about this whole matter is that having the letters “BMW” in the URL strong but so is a sub-domain or sub-directory that uses the name BMW.

If you go to Google and search for “2008 BMW cars” you will see that the top placement goes to sites that use BMW in their directory structure.  Examples on Google page one are: 

• www.motortrend.com/new_cars/01/bmw/index.html
• autos.yahoo.com/bmw  
• www.automotive.com/new-cars/01/bmw/index.html
• cars.about.com/od/bmw/a/BMW_new08.htm

BMW is standing firm that having BMW in the URL will confuse the public into thinking that the site is related to BMW.  The good news is that Internet marketers can use the name in directory structures to help consumers find their articles and related goods for BMW cars.

So, it now is very clear why so many BMW forums sites called themselves “bimmer” sites.  I guess they got the letter before me or were better advised.   There are some other interesting consequences that I see in the future for people marketing BMW related services.  This is a big can of worms.  I’ll share more thoughts on this topic soon.

For now, my Google PageRank took a hit from 3 to Zero.  I’ll have to build new links to www.dealer-seo.com and hope that soon the site will be back up in the search rankings for automotive SEO topics.