Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and then how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. It's Ed Dawson, as usual, and today we're going to talk about trademarks and SEO.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Now this has brought to me my attention by a listener, bruce, so thanks for getting in touch, bruce. Bruce sent me an email saying I saw a tip saying don't have your domain name the same as your trademark. We've done that. We've used our trademark as a domain name. What are the implications and what are your suggestions for changing the domain? Now I was hasten to add this wasn't a tip that I'd given bruce. Um, this was something he'd heard from somebody else and um, so I got in touch with bruce. I've emailed him back and we've talked through what the issue might have been and what the advice is now.

Speaker 1: 2:02

First of all, just to make it absolutely clear to have your trademark as your domain name. It's perfectly fine, it's perfectly normal. It's actually what most trademark companies use. So, for example, applecom, mic, microsoftcom, ibmcom these are all businesses where their trademark so Apple in the case of Apple, microsoft in the case of Microsoft, etc. They use their trademark as their domain name and that's completely normal, completely normal to do. I've done that with sites of mine where we've used trademark terms that we own. That's absolutely normal. So, just at the very, very top of this, say it's absolutely, completely normal to use a trademark that you own as your domain name or within your domain name.

Speaker 1: 2:46

Now where it gets tricky and I think possibly where the person giving the advice to Bruce originally got mixed up was it is problematic if you use other people's trademarks in a domain name on a website that you create. I know, for example, lego, the famous brick you know toy brick company from Denmark are incredibly litigious when it comes to people trying to use the word Lego in any domain name of any kind, as far as I can see, but specifically ones which obviously are trying to sell lego, be affiliates for lego, that kind of thing. Amazon and others have also been very, very um litigious when it comes to protecting their domain name, and you'll quite often, if you just do google like the news for trademark news, trademark infringement news, you'll find lots of cases of small companies that use trademark terms in their domain names or in their business names being told by the courts to shut down, change their names, pay damages to the trademark owner. So this is why it's really, really key that you do not use somebody else's trademark in your domain names. Okay, because a domain name can be seen as passing off as the trademark owner, so, which is what you do not want to do. You do not ever want to appear as if you are the trademark owner when you create a business or a website or anything like that. Okay, that's the key thing. Now, there are also lots of other issues around trademarks where people get quite confused and think they can't do stuff because of trademarks. So you can use trademarks in your website content, and you can even use things like trademark logos in your website content, as long as you are very, very careful, and we'll cover some of those issues now.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Okay, now just a quick disclaimer. First of all, I am not a lawyer, okay, so this is not legal advice. This is just general information. This is stuff that's available online. This is the guidance that I've always followed, and I will get into a story shortly where we did actually have a trademark infringement against us at broadbandcouk, which was dismissed, okay. So it didn't go anywhere. So I have got experience of using lawyers to defend a trademark claim against us. But I'll get into that first. So first of all, let's talk about the general things.

Speaker 1: 5:17

Okay, so where can you use brand other people's trademark brand names on your website? Well, you're allowed to use it in the copy of your website. Now, the allowed use is called nominative, fair use. It's also called referential use. Okay, now, nominative or referential use of a trademark is not an infringement. So this is where you have content in your website that refers to a product or a brand accurately. So, for example, if you offer repair services for, say, apple laptops, you can say we offer repair services for apple laptops, as long as you don't imply any kind of sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark owner. If none exists, okay.

Speaker 1: 5:54

So an example where you know you what things you shouldn't say. You shouldn't say you're an authorized reseller if you're not officially partnered with a brand, because that could land you in legal trouble, but it's not to say that you don't have to be an authorized repairer. You know, if you are repair from repairs on things, you can talk about them. Likewise, if you're selling a product and you've bought it legitimately from a wholesaler or whatever, and you can obviously clearly talk about that product, mention that product, show logos, show product images on your site when you're trying to sell it, because that's normal, fair use, okay, these things are allowed. So the thing here that we would really try and avoid is what's called passing off, and this is where one party misrepresents itself or its goods or services as those of one or another. So this is where you essentially could confuse a consumer as to who they're actually dealing with, who they're buying off.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Now, as I mentioned, obviously you can use trademark brand names if you're selling that product as a reseller and things like that. But you can also use these brand names as comparisons, legitimate comparisons, so you don't have to be selling them or have a relationship with them to use them. So things like comparison pages on a website. So if you're maybe comparing your product or a product you're selling for somebody against a third party's product that you're not selling, okay, you can make a comparison against a trademarked product, even if you don't sell it or have a relationship with it. As long as you avoid false claims, as long as you stick to factual information, you can compare your product, or another any product, with another product. As long as you're factual, obviously, if you make like, if you make things up, make misrepresentations, you could land yourself in trouble. But as long as you're factual, then it's absolutely fine to say how your product compares to another product, whether it's trademarked or protected in any other way. So those kind of things are fine. Okay, you can also allow people to do things like reviews products and review suppliers on your website, even if they're you know, if they had trademarks, because there is no law against talking about trademarked companies, trademarked brands, any of those kind of things, as long as you're strictly factual and you're not libelous. So this is a key thing to remember.

Speaker 1: 8:14

I've got an example I'm going to share where, several years ago, a brand tried to intimidate broadbandcouk into removing some content that we had on the site. So, on broadbandcouk back then I think still now, still obviously, if you haven't heard, I used to own broadbandcouk. We sold it in 2021 and it's now been run by Broadband Genie. We had thousands and thousands and thousands of user customer reviews of broadband suppliers. Now we had reviews from broadband suppliers that we had an affiliate relationship with and also for suppliers who we didn't have an affiliate relationship with, and one of those was a supplier called Pop Telecom.

Speaker 1: 8:56

In 2018, they sent us a cease and desist trademark violation, which was a lawyer's letter that they sent us and I've just got it here now and I'm looking at it in terms of what they said to us. So, yeah, here we go. I'll just sort of read out some of the bits, the key bits they said. So they listed some details of some trademarks they had, which were all image trademarks, and then they said the company broadbandcouk appears as if it is affiliated with Pop Telecom and, since no contracts or agreements are in place, it is required that you take down all websites and URLs with immediate effect. The service offered by broadbandcouk is unwanted and no recent emails on how to better resolve the issue were reciprocated. Emails on how to better resolve the issue were reciprocated.

Speaker 1: 9:41

If you do not cease and desist using the pop telecoms trademark material, we will be forced to take litigation proceedings involving legal trademark affiliation infringement action against broadband at credit uk and the owners. Now, essentially they provided some links to some pages which um will review, pages on our site, so where customers of pop telecom could leave a review. So they essentially were trying to bully us into taking down customer reviews of their service. Now we knew at high level that this was absolutely fine, what we were doing, that is what we believe was legitimate, fair use. But just to be on the safe side, we contacted our lawyers, sent them this letter and um, you know, asked them to draft a proper response for us. And in this response you'll kind of realise the kind of things that we were doing that made us safe from this kind of bullying, so that we were doing it right and we weren't doing any infringements. So here we go, and I'm just reading back now from the response letter that we sent to the pop telecom one key thing to point out was while our um lawyers went through this, they identified that pop telecom hadn't actually got a trademark for the words pop telecom, that only got trademarks for the imagery, even though they had actually subsequently applied for the Pop Telecom wording to be a trademark. And also they had given some URLs on the site that didn't exist. So we kind of said to them. We think you're talking about these ones which are review pages. Okay, so that might appear, apparently, in this wording. So here's what our lawyer letter said.

Speaker 1: 11:18

With regards to allegations that Broadbannock Code uk appears to be affiliated with pop telecom, this is clearly not the case, for the following reasons. The page is clearly identified with broadband at code uk. With the broadband at code uk name and logo prominently displayed at the top of the page. The page clearly displayed in our brand palette and not that of pop telecom. The page clearly displays in our brand palette and not that of PopTelecom. The page clearly displays in a prominent heading and further expository text that the subject and content of the page is custom reviews for PopTelecom. The page does not use any PopTelecom logos or other brand assets on the web page. The page makes no claims to be PopTelecom or be a representative of PopTelecom. With regards to your allegations of trademark infringement, your registered trademark logos are not used on the web page.

Speaker 1: 12:02

The use of the wording PopTelecom to identify the company being reviewed is permitted as referential use and does not constitute a trademark infringement. As a technicality, our lawyers point out that Pop Telecom Limited do not have a trademark for the words Pop Telecom, though we note she has recently applied for the trademark Pop Telecom Broadband. However, even if this trademark is subsequently granted, a referential use of such trademark would not be an infringement of the trademark. So that was the response that we sent to them and we never, ever heard back from them because clearly they realized they hadn't got a leg to stand on, that we weren't doing any kind of infringement. And you know that their tactic of sending out this sort of cease and desist letter wasn't going to work with us and clearly they weren't going to take us to court because it would be kicked out, because we weren't doing anything wrong. We were within the law of how we were using and referring to them as a company and their trademarks and all those kind of things.

Speaker 1: 13:00

So it's not unusual for companies to sometimes try this on. I've got friends in other industries where they've had suppliers and competitors try this kind of thing on them. And you know I've said I've shared this, my case, with plenty of other people and said, look, you know, if as long as you're not passing off, as long as it's fair use, as long as it's referential use, then you're fine. And yeah, you know, I've never known anyone successfully take something like this to court. So, um, I just thought I'd show that example so you can see how some people try it on and how we were actually making sure that we were actually completely, completely legitimately using these things. So I think that's it for today on trademarks.

Speaker 1: 13:45

Thanks, bruce, for the question, and if anyone else has ever got a question, actually a question that you would like answering, then you know all the contact details to how to get a hold of me are in the show notes. There's a whole bunch of ways of doing it and I love to hear questions from people and I'll always try and help where I can. So, yeah, do get in touch and until next time I'll speak to you later. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 14:07

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mention here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson. On both.

Speaker 1: 14:22

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use, at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content with targeted, personalized, targeted, personalized advice. Keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of sga. Is not that hard.