Last week I finally sat down and got things done. Annoying things. At the top of my list was finally acknowledging the scary letter my mum got from the London Olympics people and moving my Olympics site off of the probably-dodgy and copyright-infringing domain London-2012-Games.com to a new, less offensive (hopefully) domain.
I chose the domain OGamesGuide.com which I’m hoping these vultures don’t find any offense with. It has the word ‘games’ in it which I doubt has been copyrighted (would that even be possible?), plus it’s not specific to London which means I can use it over and over for future Games (I have a sneaking suspicion that my domain Rio-2016-Olympics.com won’t fly).
So last week I sat down and forced myself to sort this mess out. It meant transferring my site to the new domain and then uploading files with PHP 301 redirects (to direct each page of my old domain to the new domain, link juice and all) in them to each of my existing pages on the London-2012-Games.com domain. It was about 70 or 80 files, it was annoying, but now it’s done and I’m glad to get this worry out of my head.
I have a feeling that they might still ask me to remove the domian completely or give it to them (I’d rather delete it!) but, for now, these little 301 redirect babies have my new domain in the same spot as the old one already. So if you do a search for ‘London 2012 Games’ I’m on page one and if you look for ‘London 2012 Olympics’ I’m hanging in there at page two with no mention of the old domain name at all. True, I still have ‘Olympics’ splattered all over my pages but this is easily removed if I get any hassles. It’s all a bit of a learning experience and I’m curious to see what happens. So I’m happy to have this sorted out for now and extremely happy to see my new domain slotted nicely where the old domain was. I wasn’t expecting that to happen at all. I didn’t realise 301s were so powerful.
Because of the uncertainty of my old domain I put link building on hold for this site but I’m going to ramp it up again with the goal of getting to the front page of Google for both of my search terms. I want to get enough links to the new domain (and change old inbound links) so that if the Olympics people complain about the redirects and I have to remove the old domain, the new domain will be able to keep its position.
I love it when annoyingness is solved without too much hassle. I was dreading this whole process but it’s been relatively painless. Hopefully the scary lawyers have been appeased although I feel like if I’m lurking on page one, I’ll always be on their radar and they might always be looking for something to get me for. But, for the moment, I’m not too worried anymore.
Thanks for the advice, everyone! What do you think of this solution? Scary lawyers abated or is this the beginning of a bigger war?
Rather than a ton of redirect files – you could have done it with one. A custom 404 redirect page.
see: http://bobpeers.com/technical/404_redirection
But well done with not wasting the good SEO work! Trademarks are a pain!
Or you could have done it using a 301 with wildcards:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.ogamesguide\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.ogamesguide.com/london/$1 [L,R=301]
But now that it’s already done, who cares?
BTW, if having the word “Olympics” on your site is a problem: Having it in the anchor text of your backlinks isn’t. Your site will still rank for the term.
Good luck with your new domain!
@dave & @connectednomad Aaah! Time wasted! haha Yet another example, folks, of how I don’t really know what I’m doing.
If I can make this making money online thing work then I’m sure you can!
If you were super paranoid or if they keep pushing on the domain issue then maybe you could do some sort of cloaking scheme. Obviously the best way to do this would be for all backlinks to go to the site while all other traffic goes to either the official site or a page explaining the site was taken down due to blah blah blah. This would probably be a huge pain though, so you would likely have to do something more along the lines of redirecting visitors who are coming to the site directly and coming in from certain other sources. All you really care about is the backlinks as you would still be getting traffic from search engines.
I don’t think the word ‘games’ can be copyrighted?
Yay! I hope this solves the problem for you
It may drop out of Google for a while, but it should come back afterwards.
There is also a thingy somewhere in Google Webmaster Tools where you can tell them you are moving domains – worth using
Overall, site moves are supposed to be much less painful (from a traffic point of view) than they used to be (I haven’t had to move one in ages! Phew!)
I will consider this tough since i’m still new to this kind of issue, i will bookmark this so i can have a resource just in case. Never thought there are bullies in this line of business. thanks for sharing this
I hope this is the answer to your problem. Good luck with it. I know you’ve invested a lot of time in the site. Besides, I want to get all the info I need for the Olympics from someone who has lived there!
I understand tickets will go on sale in March?
am sorry you had to move your domain, after all the work you put into it. that must suck.
Oh, good that it’s sorted out now! Instead of redirecting the files one by one, a URL rewrite should have done the trick more easily.
@Jasmine, you are right but I think 301 is also important from search engine’s point of view.
I would check the word ‘games’ you’ll be surprised what lengths the Olympic Movement will go to!
It is a disgrace that they are allowed to get away with all the copyrights though.
Of course the London Olympic 2012 will have more positive than negative impacts on the local residents. It is going to help create jobs for the locals. Hotels and other business will have more costumers.
No I am quite positive that they would not be able to copyright the word games. It simply is already used for too many other things. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they still have a problem with O Games though. It is still referring to their trademarked phrase, even if it is an abbreviation of it. I guess time will tell. I think you should be able to use the word Olympics on your sites, as long as it is not confusing people into thinking your site is an official Olympics site.
I agree with this last remark by Laptop Attache in that the sites which cyber-squat with the intention of being portrayed as an official trademark site are the ones which confuse readers and which cause all the legal hawks to be on guard.
Thank you for sharing with us this nifty trick. I will keep this in mind, just in case I need to redirect my pages in the future.
Ya really its the best way to get rid from URL rewriting. I’m too doing this trick on most of my projects. Good post really…
Have you heard anymore from the bully boys at the Olympic movement?
Honestly the only thing I would worry about is the fact that you posted here what you did, hopefully it is a good enough move for them and that it does not cost you anymore troubles.
Till then,
Jean
Many Times I notices that Google ignore 301 and Read Whatever on the previous one
Gotta love 301!
It really is too bad you had to deal with the trademark stuff. At least you got it worked out.
Thanks for sharing this info, i didn’t realise 301′s direct link juice aswell… learn something everyday
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