Google has announced that it is in the process of suing several of those “Make Money at Home With Google!” sites that anyone attempting to “get rich quick” is sure to have run across in the search results.
Among the complaints listed in the lawsuit was the fact that many of those sites use the Google logo without permission. From Google’s blog post on the subject:
You may have seen offers like these using Google’s name or logo that sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately, nearly all of them are, and, despite hundreds of consumer complaints and our own efforts to keep these sites from tricking people, some scams continue. To fight back, we’re working to stop various fraudulent “Google Money” schemes, and this week filed suit against Pacific WebWorks and several other unnamed defendants.
Now obviously the problem is that these sites were pretending to BE Google, or at the very least pretending to be authorized by Google, when in fact they were not.
Now if you are using the Google logo on your site in an appropriate, non-commercial way (as it is used in this blog post), you should not have anything to worry about (I think?). It should, however, serve as a warning to anyone that uses the Google logo on their commercial site, especially if your are selling SEO services, to make sure that it is VERY clear that you are not in any way affiliated with Google.
Read more about the lawsuit over at the Official Google Blog.
