How We Infringe Trademarks

As you know, our website provides temporary phone numbers for SMS verification. At some point we decided it would be great to have a collection of landing pages optimized for individual services.

The idea was simple: someone searches for a particular service, finds the relevant page, buys a temporary phone number, receives an SMS verification code, and moves on.

At the time, we had a page dedicated to a very popular dating service.

And we didn't just casually mention the service. We optimized the page for its name.

• It was in the URL.
• It was in the title.
• It was in the H1.
• And it appeared throughout the content.

If someone searched for the very popular dating service plus "phone number" or "SMS verification", we wanted Google to understand that our page was specifically about that.

This is how we thought Search Engine Optimization was supposed to work.

Apparently someone else also understood what the page was about.

The email

One day, Cloudflare forwarded us a trademark infringement complaint.

It was an official-looking complaint from an external company acting as an authorized agent for the trademark owner.

It had all the usual ingredients:

• the trademark name
• the trademark registration number
• the trademark office
• the allegedly infringing URL
• an explanation of the alleged harm
• confirmation that the company was authorized to act
• and a request for immediate removal

The complaint essentially said that we were using their trademark without authorization and that this could cause customer confusion or harm.

They didn't complain that we were pretending to be them.

They complained about a word.

A registered word.

So what exactly did we do?

The page was basically saying:

Here is how you can get a temporary phone number to receive an SMS verification code for this very popular dating service.

• We weren't selling subscriptions to their very popular dating service or pretending to be them.
• We weren't using their logo.
• We weren't claiming any affiliation.
• We were selling temporary phone numbers, and explaining that those numbers could be used to receive a verification SMS from their platform.
• And we received a complaint exactly for that.

If that doesn't sound ridiculous enough, imagine you had a shoe store.

You create a page called "Running Shoes by (Major Manufacturer)" because you sell their shoes, so someone could find your page and buy a pair. Then one day you receive a trademark complaint from the manufacturer because you used their trademark on a page about their product.

Or you have an auto-parts store and get a complaint because it has a page about brake pads for a particular car.

The brand, the product and the customer's search query are all related. That's the entire point of the page.

The funny part

The page was actually useful.

Someone searching for "temporary phone number for very popular dating service" wasn't looking for the history of the trademark.

They wanted a phone number. Our page gave them one.

SEO rewards being explicit. So we were explicit. And being explicit turned out to be a very efficient way of getting the attention of someone whose job is to make sure you don't use that particular word.

So, what happened next?

We removed the page.

Certainly not because that page was malicious, deceptive, or pretending to be the service.

It wasn't.

We removed it because there wasn't much point fighting a trademark complaint over one landing page.

We then changed our approach.

Instead of creating pages targeting individual service names, we started using broader category names, like Email providers, Dating platforms etc.

We also added a disclaimer across the site making it clear that we are not affiliated with the trademark owners of the services mentioned on our pages.

There was another, less amusing consequence.

Traffic dropped a lot.

The service-specific landing pages had been doing their job. Removing them and replacing service names with generic categories was safer, but it was also considerably worse for organic search traffic.

So, from a legal-enforcement perspective, everything was wonderfully quiet. From an SEO perspective, exactly the opposite.

Now, the interesting part

What makes this even more frustrating is that this isn't some blackhat SEO technique we invented. All kinds of ecommerce sites do it all the time.

Some have hundreds of landing pages targeting individual services by name. They use the service names in URLs, titles, headings and content.

It's a little like walking into a shoe store and finding hundreds of pages like "(Brand 1) Running Shoes", "(Brand 2) Running Shoes" and "(Brand 3) Running Shoes", and then having one shoe store get a trademark complaint because it happened to have a page about (Brand 3) shoes.

Or imagine a computer parts shop getting a complaint because it has a page explaining which graphics cards work with a particular motherboard.

Or a laptop shop getting a complaint because you had a page titled "Laptop chargers for (laptop manufacturer's name)".

The entire purpose of those pages is to match what people are searching for.

Our competitors appear to be doing exactly what we were doing.

They just haven't received the same email.

Maybe they've simply been luckier.

Maybe their pages haven't attracted attention.

Or maybe one of our competitors reported us.

We have absolutely no evidence for the last one. However, when your competitors all have hundreds of pages doing the same thing and only one of you gets a complaint, you naturally start wondering who might have pressed the button.

We'll probably never know.

What we learned

The interesting thing wasn't really that trademark owners don't like unauthorized use of their trademarks.

That part was not exactly a revelation.

The interesting part was how easy it is to cross the line when doing SEO.

It starts innocently enough:

People are searching for this service, and our product actually works with it.

Then you start optimizing.

• You create a dedicated landing page for one product.
• Then create another one.
• And another.
• Pretty soon you've built a very efficient trademark-detection machine.

Our SEO checklist looked something like this:

The last one wasn't in the original requirements.

The final irony

We spent time making Google understand that the page was about a particular service.

It worked.

• Google understood.
• The trademark owner understood.
• Cloudflare understood.

Then we removed the page, changed the strategy, and watched organic traffic fall.

So technically, the SEO worked good.

Just not entirely as intended.

The site involved in the complaint was Tell A Bot. Since then, Tell A Bot and Get SMS Online have effectively been merged, and both use the same engine under the hood.