I have found a competitor using our company name and strap line. Is it possible to report this to Google and have them change it or removed from the listings? If so, where do I complain to? Thanks
Yep, look at the bottom of every Google search page 'Dissatisfied? Help us improve'...worth a shot. If you take legal action, it's probably not worth it . Have you tried emailing the webmaster directly? Often this can work with the right wording. Good luck
I have had better work contacting host with copyright infringement probs. Do you have trademark on company name?
No trademark on the company name but this is a clear infringement of the Google T&C's isnt it? If I started going around using Google in my listing heading in direct competition I am sure they would have a thing or two to say about it?!?!
Google's name is trademarked. I am under impression (maybe wrongly) that if you have a company name which is used as your domain name and it is not tracemarked, I can go buy the dot net or some other version. This situation is definately maddening, obviously you are dealing with a scraper. Shannon
First I would contact their hosting company and file a trademark and copyright infringement complaint. If their hosting company is a good one they will send the offending site an email telling them to remove this material or the host will remove them from their servers. If you get nowhere with that, contact Google you can learn how to file the complaint HERE. Depending on what you preceive as actual damages you can also send the offending site a certified letter asking them to remove this material and if they dont after 14 days go to your local court house and file a small claims suit against them. Once you receive a judgement, file this with Google, Yahoo and MSN. They will remove this website from their indexes. Also after you have got the judgement find any assets including the website and file the judgement with their hosting company and domain provider to take the website to fullfill some of the monetary stipulations of your judgement assuming the website would not be appraised more than what your judgement is worth. You can also if you locate their banking accounts or any personal property cease those assuming you filed against not only the company but also the onwers and officers. This includes placing liens on any residential property any of them own. Most people will not show up for small claims suits but even a 5 or 10k judgement will get them to comply with your wishes. Best of luck.
Yes agreed but they do not have the .net .com version of my company name!! In fact their company name\URL is nothing like my company!!
By all means take screen shots to have record of their misdoings. I would see if page had been up long enough to be in thewaybackmachine. Shannon
They don't give a flying f*ck. Search this: belahost netmidwest and look at how old that thread is, scroll down, see their site description... Go ahead, find 'netmidwest' on the pages themselves... Google did fix this: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=55842 rather quickly, however, when I complained. Good advice, Las Vegas Homes. It just may come to that for me, but with the cloaking in place, I can see me filing a DMCA with Google and having them say... "We don't see it... This is crap."
Don't worry, I file DMCAs all the time and twice on cloaked pages. I made reference to the cloaking on the DMCA and in both cases Google dropped the whole site (rather than just the offending page) from the index within a few days. - Michael
some one had this on there site These simple tips may save you from having to use complicated hacks on your site. Make sure to also check out the links in the Layout Hints box. this was quite smart of them as i dont normally click on a ad and i did this time the address ishttp://www.csscreator.com/version2/maketemplate.php