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Online Hijack
28 July 2001

Is your company name and reputation being hijacked on the Internet? I received a couple of phone calls recently that made me think that this might be happening more often than you realise. 

The first was from an adventure tour operator. The marketing manager had been checking how well his company was registered on the search engines by simply conducting a search for his own company name. He was surprised when one of his competitor's Web sites featured in the results listing. On visiting their site, he checked the source code of the home page and found his company's name listed (alongside all his other competitors' names) in the keyword meta-tag. (The purpose of the keyword meta-tag is to influence rankings when searching for specific words.)

The second call was from the Managing Director of a car hire company. His company's name is made-up of generic words; something like "Bargain Car Rental Ltd". (I will hide the company's true identity.) Another car hire company has launched a Web site at www.bargaincarrental.co.uk , even though its trading name is completely different. Moreover, it has branded its site "Bargain Car Rental" with no mention of its true name.
I began to suspect that brand hijacking on the Internet is rife and decided to test this by checking out our two biggest travel companies, Thomson and Airtours. 

Search for "Thomson Holidays" and you may well come across a page called "Thomson Holidays - bookpage" at http://www.thomson-holidays.freeserve.co.uk/page8.html . This is actually a page from "The completely unofficial Thomson realfeedback site". Might you think this was really a page from Thomson Holiday's Web site? Many consumers would.

Search for "Airtours Holidays" and you will find http://www.holidaysuncovered.co.uk/airtours.htm . The second line of text on the page reads, "Airtours Package Holidays - Airtours Holidays - Airtours Direct". It is clearly aiming to influence search engines to visit its site using the Airtours brand.

You might be thinking that all of these are clear-cut examples of Web sites trying to gain advantage from the explicit use of another company's brand. If only it were that simple. Only the first example is straightforward. This is a clear case of passing-off, whereby a tour operator is using the brand names of its competitors to gain custom. 

You may conclude as I have done that you must police your brand on the Internet. Conduct extensive searches for your company name (perhaps by using a search tool such as WebFerret that conducts simultaneous searches across many search engines). If you find a site hijacking your brand, firmly request them to amend their Web site. You will need to ask them to re-submit to the search engines, otherwise the references to your brand may not be removed from their indexes. You will need verification that this has been done. You may have to get solicitors involved. 

This process might not be easy, but are you prepared to allow someone to hijack the hard earned reputation of your brand? I think not.

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