Since I’ve been back in the office environment I find myself frustrated over subjects I don’t shouldn’t give a fuck about. I’m not entirely sure why I get so worked up. I think the best thing to do is just write it down and get it out of my system. One of the subjects I was talking about today was regarding how affiliate sites can claim back domain names related to their brand, however before I start moaning I think I should add a few definitions:
What’s an Affiliate?
Affiliate marketing is a marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
What’s Cyber Squatting?
Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting), according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.
Right so based on the above definition (Thanks Wiki but this SOPA blackout is killing me, thank fk for Google Cache) a company can claim a domain if it’s being used in “bad faith”. In basic if we look a few years back, Bob The Builder, Mel Gibson, TeleTubbies.com and various other sites were used to advertise online pornography. On a quick side note, if it wasn’t for porn the internet wouldn’t be where it is today. It’s what the internet is primary used for on a daily basis if you like it or not and is likely responsible for a majority of the leaps in streaming, speed and other improvements. That’s a conversation for another day. Anyway where was I, so yeah after a law was passed in1999 the domains names could be claimed back. One of the ways to determine if a site has the right to a domain name is the day it was registered Vs. the company trademark e.g. I registered eDrinker.com back in 2006 and should an energy drink company called eDrinker come out in the near future there is no way they can take my domain, as I’ve been using it to talk crap on for years.
Just to clarify before I go on, I don’t agree on cybersquatting, I hate it just as much as everyone else. I also hate companies that buy up typos such as pocker (poker) or keys that are close to each other like “pojer.com”. Believe me when I say this is an industry in its own right and I’m sure there is some serious money to be made, but nowadays it’s all robots buying up the names.
Right so one of the conversations was surrounding a well-known poker site that closed down an affiliate because he had a similar domain name. For obvious reasons I’ll use an example; the name of the site was www.HoldemMaster.com but the affiliate brought the domain www.Hold’emMasterPoker.com. Now I can understand claiming a domain if the affiliate was marketing a poker room that was a competitor but that wasn’t the case, this person was actually advertising the Hold’emMaster brand. They told me this guy had been making a lot of money from content and names similar to its brand. So when they closed it down, I asked why (I used to own www.IAskWhy.com)? As explained above the company HoldemMaster were getting their money from customers playing and the affiliate was getting their 30%, so where’s the problem. Their argument was this was already money that belonged to the brand, well I disagree. This person had the foresight to see an edge in the market he/she deserves that money and as well. I don’t claim to be an affiliate guru but I’ve had my fair share of affiliate programs in the past so I understand the basics. As an affiliate you’re provided with banners and logos for your site to market the brand and so what if they used your name in the URL, they just went that extra distance to promote the brand and the affiliate ends up getting penalized for all the hard work. If you don’t believe me here is the term which can be found in most affiliate programs be gambling or another online industry’s:
“An Affiliate shall not establish any Facebook, Twitter or other social network domains, blog domain, profile name or display name containing any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand.
An Affiliate is restricted from purchasing any domains that include any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand or bidding on any keywords or keyword phrases that include, any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand in any format in any pay per click (PPC) search engine. This includes, but is not limited to, the following search engines: Overture, Google, Kanoodle, FindWhat, ePilot and Ah-ha.
An Affiliate is restricted from utilizing derivatives of any names, words and phrases that are or can be deemed to form part of a Client Brand in URLs and directory names for the intention of search engine optimization”.
Above are the terms and conditions for “Bodog” which I currently use for my website www.BetCage.com. So what are they afraid of? Well they feel they are entitled to anything that goes with their brand name and they are worried the general public might believe you are an official site for the company. If you ask me it’s just greedy, they did what your marketing department missed and if your both making money who gives a shit.
Now get this, do you know what they do when they get that domain back? I would say most companies auto redirect to their official site e.g. you type www.HoldemMasterpoker.com in to your browser and it takes you straight to www.HoldemMaster.com. They can’t keep the content that went with that site; this belongs to the person that originally set it up, so all that good SEO and content just disappears. That also means Google doesn’t give a fuck about that website anymore so don’t expect to find it again when searching those keywords. In fact the only people it will affect are the original customers that type the URL directly into their browser. They will be redirected to the official website. Well I guess that’s what they wanted, that small pocket of customers to find the real site and as a penalty they just lost an inbound link to the site and any future traffic from that domain. Just in case anyone was thinking it, Google doesn’t like duplicate content. If were to own several domains e.g. Poker, PokerKing, PokerLightning.com and they all had the same text. In fact Google will penalize you for it, hence the reason why no big businesses do it. Again if I were to own Pepsi.de then I agree that belongs to Pepsi but if I were to own www.PepsiTatesGreat.com and I were advertising Pepsi then where’s the harm.
Just another little tip bit of information if you didn’t know and it’s something I only found out last year. I hope I don’t need to write about this whole SOPA issue going on in the United States because no doubt you’ve probably hit a page today protesting. When you setup a website you have a domain name (www.WTF.com etc) and you need hosting (a server in which your information is stored). So domain names can be brought all around the world. For example I once owned Oliver.me (Montenegro) and I brought hosting in the UK so you’d think to take down my site you have to take it up with one of those countries right. Well no there are various ways the U.S. (World Police) can tackle it. At present they trying to go through your internet service provider (see video below for 101) but did you know they also have the right to obtain a .com domain name even if the information isn’t even hosted in the U.S. This is because ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is based in the United States and they are more than happy to help seize domain names they feel the world can do without. Well after a few years of domain seizing they realise they need to step it up a level by fighting it at internet service provider level. ONLY IF WE LET IT HAPPEN.
Anyway I’m done ranting.
