Intranet Searches and Scams

As any person that searches on the intranet will find, distinguishing one organization from another can be almost impossible. I search different things on the intranet to purchase just like any other consumer, and just like any other consumer I get frustrated with search results. I find that there are many people out there that practice scamming unknowing consumers. What am I getting at by discussing these imposters? Well for one thing, it seems to be big business to scam garage door consumers. I try to stay up on what our competitors are doing and find some disturbing things in search results.

For example, I will search Grove City Garage Door to see where our site is at in search results, who is adding a new site, and who is using our trademark. I find that there are other companies that are using our name in their title tag.

What is a title tag? The title tag is the first thing you see when you search something. This example is of Angie's list in a search result. The blue highlight with the underline is a title tag. The next line is the website address, and the description after that is the meta description.

Grove City Garage Door Repair Companies - Angie's List

www.angieslist.com › Local Reviews › OH › Grove City

Angie's List

Loading...

Read Ratings and Reviews on Grove City, OH Garage Door Repair Companies on Angie's List so you can pick the right Garage Door Installation the first time.

Now when I find the above example in a search result, I think that this page should have something to do with Grove City Garage Door. However, when you click on the link you cannot find anything to do with Grove City Garage Door and cannot find it with a warrant! What does this mean? Angie's list is using a trademark to get search results for their website. Is this legal? Well no it's not. What can we do about it? Dump a lot of money into some lawyer's lap to get them to take the title down. Why use a lawyer? Well we have tried the standard contact the corporation, send an email politely asking them to remove the name from the tag, and sending out cease and desist letters. What happened? Angie's list responded that they aren't using our name to gain search results for their own lists. Can you still find this, of course you can. I just copied this link today. 01/16/2015

We are not in business to pay lawyers! It is an absolute shame that an organization does this to another organization. I feel that if you are using our trademark, then your link should go directly to something that represents that organization.

Now let's look at another example on the internet today:

Grove City Garage Door Repair – call (614) 305-7755

www.grovecitygaragedoor.org/

Grove City Garage Door is the one place to find all of your garage door solutions. We employ highly skilled technicians whose work is backed by our 100 percent ...

The above example is a perfect example of a person trying to confuse a consumer! When you find this in a search result, would you think that this is Grove City Garage Door? Of course you would because it says so. What happens next? Well you click on it and see advertising stating that it is indeed Grove City Garage Door, however, it's not the real Grove City Garage Door. Have we contacted this person that owns this one? Of course we have! What was their response? Well they basically said catch me if you can, which in turn means spend a ton of money trying to get me into court! What happened after we made contact? Well 10 more new websites came up on the internet saying they are Grove City Garage Door! What can we do about this? We are working with a lawyer to get this matter taken care of, however, it takes time and money. What does this do to our organization? Well is decreases the chances of a new customer finding us, hurts our reputation, and confuses people. What happens when a customer gets confused? They don't call you anymore!

So as you can tell, this kind of advertising by your competitors is damaging. We strive to be the best garage door service in town. And we strive to keep our customers coming back again and again.

How do we distinguish from the rest you ask? Well, we are a small business, the president of the company speaks to every customer that calls, and we give our customers the best service possible!