COLUMN: There is a “cute” trick going around where a site uses someone else’s domain name as their hidden keywords used for search engines and the attendant ranking. It’s a variation on a scam that’s been around for a while and is sometimes referred to as “Black Hat SEO.” You can even read about it in Wikipedia.

A simple example would be if a small publishing website, for example my own AscoliBooks.com, decides to increase its traffic by secretly inserting Amazon.com into its key words / phrases list. This list is hidden. But it might seriously increase the little publisher’s ranking. Amazon takes a dim view of this practice, as well it should.

Why? Because it infers an affiliation or a relationship between the sites that does not, in fact, exist. It also may be violative of copyright and trademark protection.

That’s an easy example. The true pirates do a lot more than that. Our site received an email from someone who had their site “featured” in the hidden keywords of another site. It was an e-greeting card company from Australia that complained. Someone had used their name, along with the trade name “Hallmark” and other similar or household card names in their keyword list.

Here’s what the CEO sent to me recently: I have added “xxx” to delete identifying information.

I am the legal compliance officer and CEO of E-Info XXX XXX the owner and operator of e-xxxx.xxx.xx

Please remove e-xxx.xxx.xx from your keywords otherwise we will instruct our lawyers to commence legal action- passing off is a breach of ALL commercial practices codes of conduct.

I would also suggest that you remove the other “trademarks and Copyright labels in your keywords as you are only inviting extensive and costly legal action

The matter will be reported to ICANN and WIPO- If you can’t do business ethically and with principle then don’t do it!

I also notice that you use exxxxx.com in your domain header / description – Unless you have their permission I would suggest you remove their name from your key words

That sort of got right to it.

I try to get the point across to readers that “fairness” should be your ultimate test. It’s amazing how often “legal” fits inside fairness.

TOO CLEVER BY HALF is an expression that we use in the southern U.S. I don’t know if it has gone transnational yet. Clearly it means that some clever person who thought he was a genius only got it half right – and is usually in deep trouble.

The greeting card company may have actually trademarked their website name. It’s unusual to do this but big companies should do it as soon as they know they are going to be big. I hope that’s you someday. There is some copyright protection in so far as your website should have a copyright notice on it. For example “(c) 2010 greengiantplastics.xyz”. Copyright infringement practice is not my stock in trade so I’m not going to go too far out on a limb here. But, as a general rule, titles are not copyrightable. However, there is a common practice and belief that a domain name is the sole property some person or entity. It is not quite a brand name but it certainly carries some status of ownership and the right to use with it and an identification that carries value. No one is allowed to trade off the value that my trade name or domain name associated with it.

Further, the basis of most trademark infringement litigation is based not just on legal registration but on the fact that a customer can become confused if someone else uses a name that belongs to or was first used in commerce by someone else. It’s fair and it’s the law.

Now as to our latest genius who stacked the deck in his favor using a lot of other folk’s domain names with the hope it will increase his traffic rankings – and thus making more money. These keywords are usually “hidden” and are written for the search engine spiders to find. Therefore you’d never know if someone were bootstrapping their business on the back of your hard work to give their domain name higher ranking.

Lesson: it never hurts to have a look sometimes at competitive sights that may use your domain name in hidden key words. This is not my area of expertise, but running a search on your domain name from time to time may find interesting websites attached to your domain name for no apparent reason. You or your web designer can get behind the html code and have a look at the “keywords” of which yours is one, on strange websites.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), late last year, published rules mandating that websites and bloggers disclose relationships that are not readily apparent. That means that if I pay a blogger to “promote” my site, I have to disclose this on the blog and on my website. I wish I could afford a great paid blogger that I’d have to disclose but it’s usually me, late at night, who is writing to give folks information with hopes of getting traffic for my site. And that’s what you should be doing too. And I always disclose the relationship between me and the website.

As I have discussed in other reports, this just makes sense. Some folks feel it’s a bad thing to disclose relationships. I say the FTC mandated free advertising for me to shamelessly promote myself and link it to the website. The glass half full or half empty.

Back to fraudulent keywords. Clearly a casual visitor does not see the keywords. Yet their presence may have digitally drawn them to a site that had rankings that it only got by fraud or trickery. I think there is a logical belief that the FTC disclosure requirement of relationships unknown to visitors is applicable here. In addition to whatever copyright and trademark rights are involved.

A visible cousin is cyber squatting and so-called typo-squatting. Both of dubious legality but oftentimes quite lucrative.

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Jack Campitelli, J.D., lawyer/author of #1 Best Selling “Internet Law Compliance Guide” sold in 25 countries. Designed to help small to medium web marketers comply with regulations without killing sales. Complete with fully-licensed, editable, user, privacy and purchase agreements. Read “The 10 Commandments of Internet Marketing” — free — http://www.internetlawcompliance.com/the10.html .

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