Domain name scamming

There is one thing I really hate and that is where one company selling one product buys multiple domain names and has multiple sites so they can crowd out the opposition in search engines.

I wish Google et al would do something about this and penalise them accordingly.

A good example is here :


www.power-depot.co.uk
www.batteryonline.org.uk
www.toppower.co.uk
www.pioneer-electronics.co.uk


I'm loath to actually credit them with the links but wanted to make the point. 3 different sites all leading back to one company with one telephone number.

I bet they have loads more sites too.

This really pisses me off. You can report them to Google which is what I did, and I also wrote to the lot of them expressing my disgust.

Companies like this distort the internet and are not man enough to live with the competition. They use bullyboy tactics to try and muscle the competition.

I don't mind if they have various related services. At work we have our main site, but it is very generic and gets little traffic for that reason.

Our problem is that we are a promotional merchandise distributor, so we can sell just about anything with a logo on it, but the field is so wide you that end up competing with a huge raft of different companies, even though we don't want too. Its one of the biggest sectors in the UK. So there is a huge amount of competition.

Our customers come from widely differing spectrums, and search for different types of products. We are looking for customers in particular sectors and orientate things towards them. So yes, they all want products with logos on. But usually they are after something more specific.

Typically, if someone from say the Army looks for a particular item they will miss our main site as it it is too generic. So we have a site that is optimised to them. We are looking at doing special sites for one or two other customer types. But what we won't do is have 10 different 'promotional merchandise' sites or 'army merchandise' sites.

But essentially all they do is batteries. So why not one site ? OK, so maybe they do one for audio visual equipment and one for power tools. I don't know. But effectively they are trying to crowd out the marketplace, and that just isn't fair IMHO.

I for one won't be using their services.