Who owns the keywords (Full Version)

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Scotty -> Who owns the keywords (10/15/2002 0:42:09)

We were contacted recently about purchasing the remaining contract from a SEO firm who had a client who stopped paying 3/4 of the way through a 1 year contract. They said since the client defaulted they retained the rights to the keyword traffic they had developed and were willing to sell it.
How would this work? Wouldn' t they be submitting the keywords in the clients domain name?
Regards, Scotty



erinatkins -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/16/2002 7:55:22)

Scotty,

I think we would need more info on this. I am not sure if we have all the info we need on this.

Did the customer give them the list of words that were being optimized? If so then I would consider the keywords the customers.

If the SEO company did research & found ways to get them ahead & created keywords based on this - it might be a little tougher but I would still consider the keywords the customers.

Who put the Meta' s in?

What does the contract say? If nothing is stated in the contract I would fight it.

Erin



abbeyvet -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/16/2002 8:18:20)

If I am understanding this correctly what has happened is that someone is offering to sell you the positions in SEs attained on keywords that are useful to you, but which were originally acheived for someone elses site. Right?

I think what is happening here is cloaking, a practice not much liked by SEs but used by some SEOs

Rather than (or possibly as well as) optimising your own pages for SEs, they create other pages possibley, and probably in this case, at another URL. These pages are optimised for search engines, each one (or several) targeted at specific search engines. The SEs ' see' these pages, the user never does. Requests from real users are redirected to the original site.

So, suppose that this was done, and that the new URL, or URLs, containing these highly optimised pages, are not infact the property of the site owner but of the SEO company. If the site owner now decides to end his contract with the SEO for what ever reason, the results attained by these pages can simply be referred to another site, or referred nowhere for a time. The original client will instantly lose any benefit from them.

Now the SEO has an asset - good SE positions on Keywords - which he can sell to anyone he likes.

This is, in my opinion, dubious practice. I know some SEOs defend it by saying that they have a right to retain something from their work in the event of a client failing to pay them, but the client is often quite unaware that traffic is being generated in this way and it should not be the case that if they cancel the contract they can be held to ransom by the threat of their traffic being sold to a competitor.

Most SEs have a very simple attitide - web sites that cloak will be permanently banned from their search engine databases.

Google says:
quote:

certain actions such as cloaking, writing text that can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.


That seems pretty clear!

So, I would be inclined to advise that you tell these people thanks, but no thanks.




erinatkins -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/16/2002 9:57:43)

Scott,

If abbeyvet interpreted your email better than I did - I agree with what she said. Cloaking or sending traffic to other urls is not good. I know someone who did this & got banned.

If this is what was done for this client - I feel sorry for them because they paid to get the SEO done & the keywords may not have been added to their pages.



Erin



pageoneresults -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/16/2002 12:15:48)

Abbeyvet sounds like she understands exactly what has happened. This is a practice that we as an SEO Directory of Professionals frown upon. Its done everyday and its a practice that is slowly finding its way out of our industry.

What happens is this. A client goes to an SEO firm for optimization. That firm sets up another keyword domain on their servers. They optimize that domain for the keywords that the client is targeting. They then submit that domain to the SE' s and Directories. The site that they' ve set up is pretty much a brochureware site and serves no purpose other than to act as a gateway domain to the clients domain.

They can do this openly, or they can cloak the domain. Either way, the client gets the short end of the stick if they fail to pay the SEO based on the agreed upon payment terms. I' ll bet that the pricing model was something like $75.00 for each top ten listing acheived per month or something like that.

Unfortunately there isn' t much the client can do other than meet the agreed upon terms or lose that traffic if they fail to pay the SEO. Its a bad practice in my mind and one that I hope will dissappear in the next 6-9 months.

Don' t get me wrong, there are times when a secondary domain might be appropriate due to the site structure of the main domain. Sometimes its just too costly or technically prohibitive to make changes to a clients site. If that is the case, you then have to look at other options. I personally turn these types of sites away as I don' t want to take the chance with the clients brand and possibly have them banned. Although with cloaking, its next to impossible to detect it if done correctly. Many of the top sites in highly competitive industries use cloaking in one form or another.

I' d have the client review their original contract closely and make sure that the terminology is there concerning breech of contract. It should be spelled out exactly what happens with the optimized pages that the company developed if the client were to default on their original agreement.



pageoneresults -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/16/2002 12:22:43)

Scotty, I may have misinterpreted your original post. It sounds like you have nothing to do with the client who defaulted and that this company contacted you out of the blue to purchase that keyword traffic. Maybe you have a website that fits with the keywords that were optimized.

Either way, I' d stay away from it. There is some bad karma attached to that domain they are probably going to sell you. I' d also take a close look at that domain, see if its been penalized by any of the SE' s, particularly Google.

Google has publicly stated that there is a list of domains that have been blacklisted. These are domains that have been used in the past to promote something in an unsavory manner. They are usually referred to as disposable domains. You buy one, set it up to bring traffic and when it gets banned, you buy another and do the same thing. Its a never ending process. There are thousands of great domains out there, unfortuantely some of them have been blacklisted and the unsuspecting consumer who purchases one will find themselves with a domain that they cannot get indexed by some of the SE' s.



Scotty -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 1:32:47)

I believe several of you sized it up correctly.

We were offered a chance to purchase the keyword traffic for a monthly fee or a contract. Either way, I now realize I would not have " owned" the traffic.

It didn' t sound right, so I took a pass.

By the By; I recall they were asking $500 per month for approximately 1200 monthly uniques ranking moderately well. Does that sound reasonable? I' ll see if I can raid the round file and dig up my telephone notes on this an post the specifics. Sounds spendy.

Regards, Scotty



pageoneresults -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 3:07:44)

That comes out to $.42 per visitor. Depends on the product itself. If you can acheive ROI (Return On Investment) at $.42 per visitor then it might be something worth looking into, although I doubt it very seriously. You can purchase click-thrus from Overture or LookSmart for maybe less and not have to worry about doing anything shady.

Would you be kind enough to send me the name of the company and their URL via PM (Private Message)? I sure hope its not one of our directory members. ;)



JointComms -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 8:36:11)

This is very interesting but a couple of questions come to mind.

1. How does Google find-out you' re cloaking?
2. How can you be banned?




abbeyvet -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 9:16:51)

It is not that straight forward for Google to find out, which is why people still get away with it. It can happen that if your competitors suspect you are cloaking they will inform them. If a real human goes to check it out it is pretty easy to realise cloaking is happening as the result in the index will not match the page as it should.

Banning you is easy. They just remove your site from the list of sites that they index. Is that what you mean?

The reasons they will ban you is if they have evidence to suggest that you are doing anything contrary to their terms. In essence this would mean if you are attempting to manipulate your position using methods other than properly carried out page optimisation, such as cloaking but also use (or more correctly I suppose ' abuse' ) of doorway pages, tricks like hidden text or other such things.




JointComms -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 17:41:24)

Thanks Katherine, you' ve answered ALL my questions.

On the other hand being banned from your Google - is it that bad??? Isn' t competition what it' s all about and it' s part of marketing. It' s dog eat dog.

I' m still weighing the idea of hidden text - who' s gonna check my site in the millions upon millions out there!!!!

JC Sullivan



abbeyvet -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 19:11:32)

Hidden txt will get you banned from Google right away, it is very easily detected and is detected by computer, not a human. It will be picked up with ease. Lots of sites have been banned for inadvertantly using same colored text - for example having a white background on the page and then a black header area with white text on it. Google picks that up as white text on a page with a white bg and wham, they are gone.

In such a case a few alterations, an email to Google and they will be back in. If your text really is hidden it may not be so easy.

quote:

On the other hand being banned from your Google - is it that bad???


I would say Yes, it is.

Remember that Google supplies results to Yahoo among others also. One way or another I would reckon that as many as half, and in many cases more than half, of the SE referrals to most sites originate from Google. Competition is indeed good - at the moment Google are winning the competition!

And it is not just Google that will ban you, other SEs have similar policies.



Gil -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/17/2002 20:10:07)

quote:

- who' s gonna check my site in the millions upon millions out there!!!!


Just the search engines. Google isn' t the only one that will ban you!



JointComms -> RE: Who owns the keywords (10/18/2002 7:34:06)

Thanks guyz. I guess that woke me up and help me weigh things out.



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