Affiliates Use Trademarks in Their SEO

[ssmarketing]

I'm curious to know how other merchants and affiliate managers handle the following situation:

We have affiliates that have optimized their pages with our trademark. This has been an issue because I believe that anytime affiliates seo optimize a page or pages with a your trademarked term they are taking traffic away and rerouting visitors that do a search on your brand name.

Do other merchants allow this? If so why?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Most merchants don't restrict trademarks in SEO and I think it's wrong to do that. Most only restrict trademarks in PPC.

The reasons I'd allow it, are that many affiliates are better at SEO than the merchant and could get you more rankings than you would yourself. (Would you rather have your name once on the 1st page of Google or 4 times? That's 3 more chances to get a click.) Or they may optimize for keywords you missed. Plus it's difficult and restrictive for affiliates to be an affiliate for you without mentioning your name.

My 2 cents...

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

 

[yogi1981]

Hi Linda, Your answer is good but it is a two sided sword. Let me ask that whether you allow your affiliates to do PPC on your brand keywords and redirect the visitors to a landing page where affiliate also promote other businesses?

I have also faced such situation where affiliates use our trademark name and do SEO so when someone search our trademark name, the affiliate website comes in ranking. This situation is dangerous when affiliate put other merchants' banners or links on the same landing page.

So i advise that as an affiliate manager we should not allow affiliates to use our brand name anywhere in website TITLE, META, ALT, Images, Links etc.

 

[ayolov]

Yes, but @yogi1981's example is very rare I think.

If you are an affiliate, you want every click to count and you do that by making sure there are no distractions (why display other business?) and giving the searcher EXACTLY what they are looking for, so if they were looking for brand X, the affiliate won't waste time displaying brand Y, they are already SOLD on brand X!