Red Bull win the battle over redbullsucks.com and make Carl Gamel have to hand it over to them.

This is an interesting result especially in the hotting up sector of reputation management.

“Thus, the Panel concludes that a domain name is ‘identical or confusingly similar’ to a trademark for purposes of the Policy when the domain name includes the trademark, or a confusingly similar approximation, regardless of the other terms in the domain name. In other words, the issue under the first factor is not whether the domain name causes confusion as to source (a factor more appropriately considered in connection with the legitimacy of interest and bad faith factors), but instead whether the mark and domain name, when directly compared, have confusing similarity,”

To read where the story broke try Out Law

To view the full WIPO ruling click this that link WIPO Ruling

I had a post all lined up to talk about “calling people out”, which was inspired by The Wolf, re Seth Godin, but I have scratched that in favour of actually calling someone out.

As the title of this post says, at this point I think Michael Gray is talking shite when he says that bloggers, unless uber big names, should quit blogging as they are just regurgitating the already over blogged about news.

Maybe it is rather nice bit of linkbait, but like every man in the known world, if you see a sign that says “wet paint” you have to touch it, or “hot surface” you have to try it to see if it really is hot.

Well GW says that seo bloggers should step away from the keyboard, here’s why you should not (quick thoughts):

1. It’s your right to blog, to do whatever you like.
2. You should not be put off by a killjoy.
3. You have to start somewhere, if you are serious and passionate about something then don’t let anyone turn you off.
4. People write in different styles and have different hooks, find your hook and write (if you can be arsed), and some people will prefer your coverage of the same old news. I have canned people from my feed readers because they simply bore me!
5. Stick to your guns, all the successful people I know have focus and have not deviated from what they wanted to do, even in the face of the nay sayers.
6. Have fun!
7. If they don’t like you they can turn your feed off or read somewhere else, so screw em!

Now here is a disclaimer, I may have just fallen for the link bait, and the reason I have bitten is that I respect GW immensely, always have, so when someone you respect talks poo you need to prod them.

Every once and a while you find stuff that large search agencies have done and find yourself wondering how they can get away with doing questionable things.

When I say questionable I mean it can be picked to bits in minutes (well maybe 10’s of minutes)

Imagine my surprise when a mate showed me an email that he had received as part of his alerts system that showed a page with lots of lovely text links to different high profile sites. Well on it’s own not really that harsh, but couple that with another alert about a rather large company, lets call them vacationautos signing up with a fictitious search agency, let’s call them bluelight. Add into the mix how the vacactionautos has recently been seen in a highly prized search space, one it has never been seen in before.

How do we know the links were placed there by the agency? Well the links to all the other client sites is teeny weeny clue, plus a little digging.
The moral of this story if you are a search agency try not to get greedy by thinking you can link to clients in bulk from the same network. If you truly value your clients I think you should NOT shout about having them, if you are good you wont need to say you do SEO for XYZ. There have been a number of mates who have had clients that a handful of people have been able to rip apart their SEO.

If you are a person/org looking for an SEO, then ask lots of questions, make sure they are doing nothing and will admit to it. True enough you cannot control Google so you really have no cast iron guarantees, but you can get some cast iron assurances.

Above all, remember the saying, loose lips sink ships!

Looks like those folks at buy.at have sold to AOL for a figure around £50M**.

Nice work and well done those folks up in Newcastle.
** Grape vine figures at this stage.