Hi I would welcome your opinion. I have a site where I use the words Total Immersion Swimming to link to a Total Immersion page as an advert for them. I did this for free as a favour. I recently put up a page for a friend who is a qualified Total Immersion coach and it outranked Total Immersion themselves. They now tell me I can't use the words 'Total Immersion' on my website to link to anyone other than them and nor can I use the words in my page name. I have managed to comply with these requests and still get a number one google rank for the phrase "total immersion coaching" for my friends advert. I suspect they won't like this and the next thing will be I can't use the words in my page title and so on, in other words I can't do anything that allows me to outrank them. Can they do this? I feel I'm not doing anything wrong morally. My friend has spent thousands becoming a TI coach and I promised him a high ranking advert page. I feel they simply don't like it ranking well. This is unfair but can they legally stop me ranking well? At present there is no agreement in place between TI and this coach although they want him to sign one giving them control over how he can advertise. Your comments would be appreciated. Gay C
Just an afterthought looking at it another way. Suppose you have a site called FreddysGreetingCards for example, and I then put up a page on my website called FreddysGreetingCards.htm and link to it using FreddysGreetingCards as link text. I will probably say nice things but do you have the right to tell me I can't do this if Freddys Greetings Cards is your trademark? I know it's done all the time on the net and usually it's welcome.
Well, this is actually a very grey area at the moment. Seeing as they asked you not to link to them, or use that link text I think they might be able to force you to stop. I'm assuming that Total Immersion is a trademark of theirs. You might find this useful: Linking Rights However, I'm not a lawyer, and it might be best to consult one that specializes in digital and internet law. From a webmaster point of view, I think what they are trying to do is absolutely bogus. It comes down to them claiming exclusive rights to certain keywords. Good luck, and let us know how this turns out.
Thanks for that. The article was interesting although it talked mainly about people linking to some-one elses server. What I'm doing is using keywords to link to my own pages.
I know, but that is somewhat relevant, in that there is a president where people could prevent you from linking to a certain site. Although I can't see how this will affect your situation. The only thing I think they can do, is try to enfore their Trademark.
Thank you for your comments. I really hope they will be sensible about this. They have already had one coach go off and do his own thing in direct competition. You would think common sense says if they get a reputation for taking peoples money and then not letting them use the qualification they have paid, this would be really negative for them. Ah well, that's business!