What are these guys doing?

[tombarr]

The problem is it's a grey legal area that has not been litigated yet, or at least not that I have seen.

He's working the keyword strength of pages that rank well and using links to the original site, so he gets the benefit of the search result for that site and it's keywords, without trademark infringement.

He is not blatantly buying your trademark in adword buys but taking a different approach.

It's a pretty devious approach, albeit very well thought out and strategically it does work.

I don't think you are going to get ISP's or SE's, or much interest in punishing him until search engines themselves rule against it...which does not seem to be happening at this time.

[tombarr]

An interesting Paper along this line of thought...although it doesn't provide any recourse recommendations, it is a good educational read for those interested.

SEM Hijacking

[Dzinerbear]

Tombarr, thanks for the article link. There's a couple more here at SEO Chat that talk about stealing a number one ranking: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Op...Google-part-1/

ONe expert told me about the only thing you could really do is to work harder to push up your PR and get more backlinks and just SEO your pages better so you deek ahead of him.

But do you figure the stuff he has on his page was captured in time, or as I update my pages, are his pages updated?

I'll have to check my logs to see if this guy is actually sending me any traffic, which brings up the whole legal issue: he's just using my good ranking to help is, he is afterall sending me traffic if someone clicks the link. So a judge would likely say: "What are you complaining about?" Still it's a piss off that we do all the leg work and some jerk just rides your coat tails.

Oh well.
Michael

[Chilihost]

I have had this happen to quite a few of my sites, I have tried using the google complaint page but that never helped. Unfortunately, since you have not officially copyrighted your terminology you are pretty much SOL.

These guys suck, but maybe if enough of us complained to google and other search engines they might blacklist their domains, but its not likely

cheers,
Luke

[Dzinerbear]

Maybe if enough of us complained to the sponsors they are promoting. Of course the sponsors are making money, so it would have to be more than a handful of complainers. I hate the scum in this business.

Michael

[shaun]

Ok - here is a strange idea... but I have had luck with it....

Write to the guy and tell him that this isn't ok and ask him to not do it. I have done this on several occasions, and on every occasion, the "culprit" was cooperative and apologetic.

When I have had this happen to me, frequently it isnt the site owner at all, but someone who has been hired to do marketing etc....

[Rainbo1956]

Ok - here is a strange idea... but I have had luck with it....

Write to the guy and tell him that this isn't ok and ask him to not do it. I have done this on several occasions, and on every occasion, the "culprit" was cooperative and apologetic.

When I have had this happen to me, frequently it isnt the site owner at all, but someone who has been hired to do marketing etc....

I agree.
This had happened to us many times. But, since we were also trading links with other sites I felt like, what the hell...why not have our site listed on as many other sites as we can. More traffic "if" they're getting it.
Yeah it used to burn the hell out of me that when I did a search for my key words or my site that they would come up first in the search. But, there was little I could do...except write them and ask them to stop...usually they'd stop it right away and things would go back to "normal"...only to have someone else do it right behind the last culprit

[Dzinerbear]

Hey guys,

I understand what you're saying about just accepting it and taking the traffic. However, why I've got a bee in my bonnet about this kind of stuff is that I take SEO VERY seriously and I don't fuck around with search engines. I don't play tricks and use techniques that are of the quick fix variety. And I don't want to be associated with people who do. "You lie down with dogs you get fleas" and that sort of thing.

However, given this domain is registered in Samoa, I doubt I'll be too successful tracking anyone down. So I'm kind of in a "live with it" place.

The good news is that scammers like this are usually pulling all kinds of stuff that'll eventually catch up with them, and then, they'll disappear from Google.

cheers
Michael