Some sort of spam problem. Please Please help me

[jgarner]

If you go to Yahoo! and type "willieholmesministries" (This is a customer of mine) you will get a few results close to the bottom with decent title, description, but the URL will be something less than....family-oriented. It's really strange, these are not "bad" sites, and they redirect to directory-style pages with different domain names, but being that this is for a church, it is just a little upsetting. Can someone please tell me what's going on and how do I rectify it.

[mpilatow]

I see "www.willieholmesministries.org" as the top result but under that it is mostly a bunch of parked domains. For some reason they are targeting the term willieholmesministries as a keyword along with other terms and gibberish. I am not really sure why they would go after willieholmesministries but that is what they did.

I am not sure there is a whole lot you can do about it though. I suppose you could try to contact the site owners and ask them to stop using that term. I don't think you can legally force them to do anything though.

[blitzen]

Unless you trademark the term.

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by blitzen

Unless you trademark the term.

Registration of a trade or service mark is no quarantee against this type of activity. For example, as a matter of stated policy:

1) Yahoo/Overture will not allow PPC listings for which the search terms are protected names; but,
2) Google will allow such.

If the listing that you are concerned about are organic ones, rather than sponsored ones, you'll need to contact the search engine and ask them to have the offenders listing removed from their indices.

[craigmn3]

This looks to me like a case of BAD linking strategy
Those "bad" urls all redirect to the same google rip off.

Where have you been submitting these links to?

You did a great job in getting your client in ALL the top ten in Yahoo for the Keyword: "willieholmesministries"

I am just not sure of a way for you to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The "Good News" is that no one is going to search "willieholmesministries" and "willie holmes ministries" searches clean.

It reminds me of what my Mama always said, "Don't put that in your SEO strategies, you don't know where it's been"

[sysopdan]

about what it is doing, they really need to get a trademark. Then start enforcing it.

Anyone could come along and hijack the name otherwise, to a much greater degree than anything happening now.

If they can't afford $300, then I wouldn't even bother worrying about website placement and what anyone is doing with the name. You would just be wasting your time.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by jgarner

If you go to Yahoo! and type "willieholmesministries" (This is a customer of mine) you will get a few results close to the bottom with decent title, description, but the URL will be something less than....family-oriented. It's really strange, these are not "bad" sites, and they redirect to directory-style pages with different domain names, but being that this is for a church, it is just a little upsetting. Can someone please tell me what's going on and how do I rectify it.

Not sure why it matters, but creating some more pages targeting that keyword would help push those down, right?

[deepsand]

Originally Posted by sysopdan

about what it is doing, they really need to get a trademark. Then start enforcing it.

<snip>

As noted above, having a registered trade or service mark doesnot grant exclusive right to use of such to the owner.

[nelsonez]

The "Good News" is that no one is going to search "willieholmesministries" and "willie holmes ministries" searches clean.

I would have to agree with the previous poster. What are you worrying about ... no one is going to search "willieholmesministries". I bet if you look at your server logs you get one or two of those searches a month. Why care about that.

Eric

[buster]

All the dodgy entries I looked at go to qooqlesearch.com. Bearing in mind how unhappy google are with booble, it might be worth alerting them to the black hat techniques apparently being used.

However, looking at the sources for a couple of cached entries, the term williehomesministries doesn't even appear, so I am not sure how they have done this.

It is also a possibility that this is some form of attack on your client and their religious views. It could also be worth you or your client pointing out this search and its results to google.

John

Good luck