Cheeky Git!

[Guy King]

The message from "The Medway Handyman" contains these words:

Just shove him in the KF with Drivel.

[Guy King]

The message from Andy Hall contains these words:

Don't you mean indefensible?

[Grunff]

nightjar It depends on the business you are in. I found that, at 20p per click, it

Precisely - it works extremely well for some businesses, and not at all for others. Some of our clients spend huge amounts of money on Adwords per day, which is more than recouped in sales revenue.

[nightjar]

My point is that, contrary to what you claim, his prices structure and his main prices - I would exepct most jobs to be fairly short ones, subject to hourly rates - are different from yours. You charge the same hourly rate whatever, while he starts out dearer, but works out cheaper for 2-3 hour jobs.

Given the similar nature of the work you do, I would expect you both to have to convey similar information about your pricing. His wording is slightly different from yours, so there is no evidence of plagarism.

It wouldn't bring you any more business, which is surely the point. Meta tags are so little used these days that I don't even bother to set them up on new pages.

You seem to have no grasp of basic marketing. Obvious spelling or grammatical errors (although I don't class erratic capitalisation in that - few people have ever been taught any rules about it) are an excellent way to get people to contact you. People love to tell you that you have got something wrong. Once they are in contact, you can start selling to them. However, my point was that your site looks as though it was produced from a Microsoft Page Maker template, while his looks as though it was designed by a professional - it is more attractive to the eye.

Colin Bignell

[nightjar]

However, as meta tags are virtually worthless - only one of the less important search engines even looks at them - it would be difficult to support a claim that using a phrase in them is likely to divert business.

Colin Bignell

[The Medway Handyman]

Colin Bignell wrote;

What? A marketing ploy based on incorrect spelling? Are you having a laugh?

It was designed with Frontpage. Like many 'web snobs' you assume that the public gives a toss or even knows. I get lots of compliments about how friendly & easy to use the site is. They don't care or realise how it was made, as long as it tells them what they want to know.

If I pick up a brochure on a product I don't give a toss what type of machine printed it or what make of ink was used. I simply want the content - not the vehicle.

[The Wanderer]

A very commonly used ploy. A previous landlord of a pub - now sadly closed, but that's another story - in our village (on the Norfolk Broads) used to circulate fliers to boating holidaymakers with a couple of spelling mistakes, he reckoned he'd get at least two or three comments a week about it.

May not seem a lot, but as the pub was a good five minute walk away from the river and there are two others right on the riverside, it was obviously attracting some attention.

[Bob Eager]

Reply from Nominet, just now:

"Thank you for your email. Nominet provide the option to opt out of the WHOIS search facility. However, this is only for registrants who are living individuals who are not using their domain name in the course of a business, trade or profession, ie consumers.

After checking the website for the kent-handyman.co.uk domain name it appears that the website is being used in the course of business and/or trade. In light of this we have opted the registrant into the whois. You

can now view their contact address information via our whois at

"

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Err, it *didn't* make it clear at all. Otherwise there would have been no adverse reaction to it.

You've been around long enough to know that if you selectively quote then add a comment everyone will believe it's that quote your commenting on. So stop wriggling.

[Andy Dingley]

Meta tags aren't "virtually worthless", they're of small worth.

For the legal issue here, then that's a significant difference. Modifying meta tags in this way shows clear intent, but as already agreed, intent isn't material. We're concerned with likely damage and if even one search engine might be misled here, then we've proven _some_ diversion of search traffic and that's as much as we need.

Secondly, they appear to have purchased the relevant Google adwords for Medway handyman. Again, although this intent is irrelevant, they don't appear to have purchased a likely set for "rochester, chatham" etc.

[John Rumm]

nightjar It wouldn't bring you any more business, which is surely the point. Meta

I have found it is still worth setting the "description" tag since lots of engines will display the content of that on search results.

[Michael Rozdoba]

This info is also in the public domain:

Kent Handyman Services Handyman Contact Derek Dowding Call 08708031586 or 07793232039

Telephone: [phone] Mobile: [phone] Address: Derek Dowding Kent Handyman Services

16 Grove Road Chatham Kent ME4 5HS

See

[Michael Rozdoba]

So they have.

indeed confirmed as current by a whois query:

whois kent-handyman.co.uk

Domain name: kent-handyman.co.uk

Registrant: derek dowding

Registrant type: Not supplied

Registrant's address: 16 grove road chatham kent kent ME4 5HS United Kingdom

Registrant's agent: Dollamore Ltd t/a StreamlineNet [Tag = STREAMLINENET] URL:

Relevant dates: Registered on: 01-Aug-2006 Renewal date: 01-Aug-2008 Last updated: 22-Nov-2006

Registration status: Registered until renewal date.

Name servers: ns1.streamlinedns.co.uk ns2.streamlinedns.co.uk

WHOIS lookup made at 11:33:36 22-Nov-2006

[Bob Eager]

Well, I did check before I posted...!

[Andy Dingley]

There is a need to prove the case, not to prove it very much indeed.

;

It does make the offending site prominent though (especially the use od AdWords), even if not the only prominent site. No one is claiming that it will absorb _all_ traffic, it merely needs to divert a fraction to be a passing off.

No, not at all. The issue of whether search engines are recognised by UK case law as representing "goodwill" is an interesting one, but my doubt is to whether this has already been settled or not, not how it will eventually be settled. To claim that they aren't would be a travesty.

Indeed -- which is why it's useful to approach them first in a low-cost manner, as this can be done (carefully) in a manner that's not prejudicial to any final court outcome, where it unfortunately to go that far.

I don't believe he has any defensible claim on the name whatsoever (and he might like to think about making some for the future). However this isn't necessary for the action we're talking about here.

[Lobster]

Well yesterday the site had the words "MEDWAY HANDYMAN" displayed in large yellow letters at the top of the home page. Seems to have dissappeared today: has Dave been on the case?? ;-)

David

[Dave Plowman (News)]

As ever a matter of taste. But it doesn't load properly here.

[Bob Eager]

Then there's the spelling mistake in the ...

[nightjar]

Indeed. Both Description and Title are well worth while taking some trouble over. Microsoft recommend a maximum of 250 characters for description and

50-80 for title, which seems to be about right.

Colin Bignell

[nightjar]

It is a well-known ploy. There will always be someone who cannot resist telling you about it and getting potential customers to contact you is half way to selling them your services.

...

That's the one I meant.

The main reason that it is disliked is that it wrote bad HTML. I haven't used it for years, so I don't know if that has been fixed. However, the point I was making had nothing to do with that; The standard templates simply look old fashioned compared to what is available on the web today. Irrespective of the web authoring programme you use, I think your site would benefit from a more modern look, which you could simply do by applying some custom graphics to your existing site.

That is important, but is independent of the web editor. In general, viewers should be able to reach what they want to find in a maximum of three clicks or 8 seconds. With a small site like yours, that is quite easy to do.

You don't seem to take criticism well, even if it is constructive. Nevertheless, I will offer you this advice:

You have only registered the domain name medwayhandyman.co.uk. As a minimum, you should also register medway-handyman.co.uk, but I would snap up the two .me.uk and probably the two .com variants as well. If you don't have those domain names, anyone, including your competitor, could register them and automatically point any hits on those sites to his own.

Having registered a few extra domain names, populate as many as you can with web sites. A Google search on medway handyman only comes up with three different companies. If you have a number of sites, you will get more hits and, if you take a bit of trouble to optimise the sites for search engines (Google do a good guide, as do Microsoft, although they still think meta tags are useful), you may also push your competition down the page a bit. The top three places bring in most business and, if you populate all those, you will be laughing. This will involve a bit of work - the robots can spot cloned sites, so they all need to be different and you need to do things like register with Google and use their webmaster tools - but it should be worth it if the web is a serious source of business for you.

Colin Bignell