The beginning of an end?
I cannot help but to notice that it seems we have found the beginning of an end to the days of search engine’s for finding results related to what you are looking for on the web. At this point it is almost to the point that you better just know before hand what you want to find and where to find it because what we once knew as meta keywords and the newer content keywords are just about pointless now.
Earlier today I ran a query on a few of the keywords we use which I might add we only use relevant keywords to what you will find on our website. The results did not surprise me much. We are number one in the major search engines and within the top 7 at most others. Not to bad I must say but here are a few of the things we have been noticing.
About 4 weeks ago we noticed that our content was appearing in search engine results but not under our link. Ok so maybe it is because they are linking back to us. Yea, Not a chance! So we go to the website that has a title like asylum et Halloween. You do not see our content on the site nor do you see any link to us. As a matter of fact what you do see is some google advertisements or other PPC (pay per click) type adds.
So now just what happened here? After about half a moment of thought we use view source in ie or Page Source in Firefox. Now we notice a few lines in the <head> </head> tags. In between the tags we see that we have some obfuscated JavaScript. After examination of the poor attempt at disguising what was really going on we find that they are using the JavaScript to grab results from other sites and generate hidden keyword text in their page from other sites. And then of coarse after getting some of the traffic that intended to find the original content the user sees adds and such in which case like it or not are clicked and these fools are paid for it.
Another thing we have noticed is that it is really even worse than we had thought. Asylum Entertainment, and Asylum-ET being an abbreviation of Asylum Entertainment is what we chose as a trade name for our company in 1992. We have registered Asylum Entertainment as a trade name. Now we see that there are other Asylum Entertainment’s out there as well. One being what I have been told is a great game making company and another being a film production company. There are others as well but I wont list any others because they are not at all entertainment related.
Overall we do not mind sharing the name with these other companies under certain restrictions I will describe further below. We are an entertainment-oriented company in the fullest extent of the meaning. We cover literally every corner of entertainment. Film, photography, bands, dj’s, theatrical and staged performances, parades or whatever you can think of really. We have even written a few games for that matter as well as being a private record label which is an organization of many artists. We provide access to vendor services, Organization and coordination of events. The list is just about endless so we have come to a point that the name Asylum Entertainment and other versions of it have started to become genericized.
This is a bit troublesome at first thought but I personally will provide my fullest abilities to maintain that the two previous companies and our own Asylum ET remain at the top of search engine results being that they are the only ones that have any reason to come up for such a search query. We have even contemplated partnering up with these two other non-affiliated companies for nothing more than to protect our name from genericide. This at the moment is not a public matter though so we will not go any deeper into that yet. Just the same though this is not just a problem with our trade name but with many others as well. I encourage all companies that maintain a website to look into who is using their trade name or anything else provided as content such as text, media or whatever. It is not proper nor is it legal in most cases that someone uses your content alone due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act unless you give them specific written permission to do so especially if they are using it solely to divert your traffic to their web advertisements.
