how to prove them wrong? ... advice needed :)

Hi all,

Hoping all is well

Back again, looking for some advice on a semi-urgent situation.

Obviously names are made up .. but hopefully the situation is clear.


Background/timeline:

We have a client (1&OneLTD) going through a SEO some drama.


- A key member of staff left "1&One LTD" to start their own - very similar - company called "2&Two LTD".
- 1&One LTD bought an exact-match domain that competes extremely well against the former member of staffs' new company website (2&Two LTD).
- 2&Two LTD is now claiming that these actions cost them sales, traffic, customer time on site, and increased the bounce rate (additionally, if useful, they use a bunch of SEO/SEM channels).
- they are claiming this occurred over a number of years
- We have access to our clients (1&One) analytics data, etc, but obviously not the competitors (2&Two)
- this is now in a legal process.

Obviously, there are many other factors that could have contributed to this drop in traffic but we need to prove that this did not come from the Exact Match domain deployed by our client.


I'm looking for thoughts/ideas as to how to blow this claim out-of-the-water - to an extent that they drop or reduce the claim??!

... any data-analytics ideas; third party tools; strategy ideas; etc -- would be most welcomed.

Many thanks in advance!

Start with historical ranking data and social share statistics, those are verifiable. You can now use "dictum sequitur" to claim that other claims are false.

Castamir said:

Start with historical ranking data and social share statistics, those are verifiable. You can now use "dictum sequitur" to claim that other claims are false.

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Amazing! Thank you. That’s a term I’ll have to look up

could you recommend a tool(s) for historical ranking data? SEMrush?

timmytwosteps said:

Amazing! Thank you. That’s a term I’ll have to look up

could you recommend a tool(s) for historical ranking data? SEMrush?

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You can access that from Google search console since your client owns the domain. It's a trustworthy data source. Semrush is also verifiable but I don't know if it maintains data over more than a couple of months?

If 2&Two LTD is not trademarked, they can't really do anything. If it is, you got to give it back whether or not it's the cause of their traffic drop. It gets more complicated if 1&One bought the domain before 2&Two trademarked it. And it gets even more complicated if 1&One can prove that they bought the domain in good faith. Nissan, for example, couldn't get nissan.com because it was bought in good faith by a guy named Nissan.

Castamir said:

You can access that from Google search console since your client owns the domain. It's a trustworthy data source. Semrush is also verifiable but I don't know if it maintains data over more than a couple of months?

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thank you - appreciate the advice

roydan said:

If 2&Two LTD is not trademarked, they can't really do anything. If it is, you got to give it back whether or not it's the cause of their traffic drop. It gets more complicated if 1&One bought the domain before 2&Two trademarked it. And it gets even more complicated if 1&One can prove that they bought the domain in good faith. Nissan, for example, couldn't get nissan.com because it was bought in good faith by a guy named Nissan.

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yes, was thinking the same.
the domain doesn't look to be trademarked - its a very generic name (not far off "second hand car sales .com", for example).
have a call with legal coming up so will definitely be asking these questions.
thanks for your advice

If it were me i'd offer the domain to 2&two for 10x the revenue it has brought in over the last 3 years and move on. Or if the domain makes a decent amount of money, I'd offer to buy 2&two for scrap rate. This sounds like an intimidation lawsuit. If I had owned meta.com and zucky decided to change his company name to meta, he will have to buy the domain from me to use it and as long as I have it I am free to put up anything I want to on it.

Paranoid Android said:

If it were me i'd offer the domain to 2&two for 10x the revenue it has brought in over the last 3 years and move on. Or if the domain makes a decent amount of money, I'd offer to buy 2&two for scrap rate. This sounds like an intimidation lawsuit. If I had owned meta.com and zucky decided to change his company name to meta, he will have to buy the domain from me to use it and as long as I have it I am free to put up anything I want to on it.

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thank you - great ideas

roydan said:

If 2&Two LTD is not trademarked, they can't really do anything. If it is, you got to give it back whether or not it's the cause of their traffic drop. It gets more complicated if 1&One bought the domain before 2&Two trademarked it. And it gets even more complicated if 1&One can prove that they bought the domain in good faith. Nissan, for example, couldn't get nissan.com because it was bought in good faith by a guy named Nissan.

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any idea on how much this nissan guy wants to sell that domain for?

fb3003 said:

any idea on how much this nissan guy wants to sell that domain for?

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I remember reading somewhere that he died a few years ago, and before that he fought Nissan motors in court for holding his domain for a really long time. There's an email there if you want to reach out to them, but I really doubt you'll get a reply.