I tell you, nothing pisses me off more than people who think that its acceptable to trade on someone else’s name.  In the online billiards business, most of us have a gentleman’s agreement that goes something like this:  If you don’t run advertisements on my name, I won’t advertise on your name.

Let me give an example.  One of our bigger competitors is Ozone Billiards.  When I set up my Google Adwords campaigns, I don’t run ads on searches for ozone billiards, ozonebilliards.com, etc. because it is both sleazy and unnecessary.  Ozone in turn does not advertise on searches for pooldawg, pooldawg.com, etc.

Now most of the folks in this business play nice, but there’s one that doesn’t.

I don’t know if I should be flattered that he thinks our brand is so much stronger than his, irritated that he’s trying to trick customers into visiting his site or just plain sorry for him that he needs to resort to such sleazy tactics in order to try and get some extra sales.

Of course its not just us.  He uses this “tactic” on every major name in the business.  Ozone, Mueller’s, Cuesight, etc.  For some, he even goes so far as to violate the Google TOS by using the company’s name in his ads.  I even politely asked him to stop.  I explained to him that there are literally thousands of relevant keywords to choose from, so it seems unnecessary to try and confuse searchers.  His response was to blame some anonymous affiliate.  When I explained to him that if it was an affiliate he could simply look at the target url to figure out who it was, he stopped responding.

I guess a bad economy makes people desperate.  Pathetic.

Yiddish Word of the Moment:

Nayfish: A weak, pathetic person of little consequence.