lose lose win

Is it possible to sell a slightly negative review site to the product/company that you are neg repping?

For instance, I found a brand exact match .org that has 2k exact local searches. with a cpc of $7.50.. When checking the competition, the product manufacturer has the top spot with the brand EMD .com, and has the .net redirected to the .com. The second spot is genericproductname.com (ie "car" if keyword was "honda"), that is simply a landing page redirected to the brand .com. 3-10 is just bs forum posts of said products.

should be super easy to get to #2

So, basically this manufacturer has the whole serp to themselves. Am I wrong in thinking that if a review site (me) popped into the #2 spot with less than glowing reviews, and possibly suggesting a competitor's product that the company would take notice and possibly offer to buy my site?

Feel free to shoot my strategy full of holes..

jaxstar

So you own a site with (presumably) a trademark in the domain which you hope to SEO to get to #2 and sell said domain to the trademark holder? If that's the case, sounds like a great idea to me. Good luck with it.

freezeprogram

Sounds like a recipe for prison time.

lose lose win

yeah, I also meant to ask about the legal ramifications of this.

I assume the only concern would be that the TM was in the domain name?
Otherwise, it isn't illegal to have an opinion on a product. What about sites like paypalsucks.com?

lose lose win

yes, this is the plan in a nutshell.

andyk

If your domain name contains their trademark, it probably won't work. You can expect to get a C&D letter from them in response.

lose lose win

proceed anyway?

jaxstar

Taken from Cybersquatting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Since you already said you want to sell it to him, its cybersquatting. There's nothing wrong with you having a TM sucks site if your intentions aren't to then sell it to the TM holder. That's called free speech.

My thought is, life is too short. Find some other way to make money rather than on the backs of others. And as a TM holder, it really pisses me off when someone like you buys a .whatthefuckever extension and puts up a copycat site with the intentions of profiting from my work. Its a waste of my time, money and energy.

blogspotter

I was comfortably nowhere on the SERP for two years on a brand Name domain.
I slapped a few articles for the heck of it, and threw some links until I came to page 1 rank 4.

I got a C&D. The fun lasted only a couple week...

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lose lose win

so the domain is basically useless? that sucks.

i guess the only possible option would be to create a site using the name for a completely unrelated site, and then rank it? collect some adsense monies.

should i just not even bother with this project?

wallofillusion

How does this apply to stuff which isn't negative? For example, if I launched a site called "FIFA 12 Cheats" (fifa12cheats.com, or whatever), is it likely to be given a C&D?

freezeprogram

Your initial plan basically amounted to blackmail.

lose lose win

so what about just having their brand name in the url, not the domain?

if thats still pushing it, i will just rank without the brand in the url at all. number 2 spot is easily doing it.

StarkReality

Really depends on the trademark holder, some companies are very laid back, others will instantly C&D you. I personally would stay away since building a site, doing SEO and then having to turn it off when the C&D isn't really satisfactory. You have zero control of what happens and what not.

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