Brand Names in Page Titles

[authcode]

What's the official line on using merchant brand names in our page titles? My titles take the form "product from merchant".

I'm not doing this to mislead my visitors, it's simply the most obvious title for the content of the page, but I'm concerned that this isn't accepted although I can't find anything in programme policies that specifically disallows it.

This recent email has made me nervous:

Ultimate Finish is concerned that sales generated by Voucher Code sites are producing cannibalistic sales, especially where organic listed URL's include our registered brand name. It is our considered opinion that these sales would under normal circumstances have come to Ultimate Finish direct.


Has anyone had problems with using merchant brand names in their page titles?

[IntroSites]

I use "ProductName only £Cost at Merchant" and never had any complaints, im just telling them the cost at a various store, not pretending to be the store

No merchant names in URL

example: here (http://www.click2compare.co.uk/product/p-8823888/c-256.html)

[Andy]

Ive found that all brand bidding PPC guidelines are written in such a way as to confuse everyone into thinking they go for our actual pages.

retailerName.mysite.com isn't allowed as the display URL in most PPC rules, This is to prevent PPC affiliates from "passing off". Bidding limits are usually added to stop inflation of the retailers own click price.

but there's (usually) nothing stopping me from creating a subdomain for SEO efforts. (actually, this did very well for me once!! :) )

Personally, I think that if retailers start getting narked at the way we do our organic SEO, then they might as well just forget about an affiliate program.

I don't see anything wrong with having trademarks, brand names or anything else in Titles, headings, page url's etc (obviously, registering a domain name is different and constitutes passing off in my book) so long as it's accurate information, any trademarks are identified if requested by the retailer ( "The Body Shop" is a good example) and we don't mislead any user into thinking we are the Official XXX site, then I don't see any problems at all

If retailers start creating stupid SEO rules so they always win in the SERPs as well as the PPC listings, affiliate marketing will die completely.

[authcode]

I absolutely agree Andy, and part of my concern was, as you suggest, based on the fact that many merchants have comprehensive PPC restrictions but until now I hadn't seen mention of SEO restrictions.

I don't understand why Ultimate Finish even has an affiliate programme if they're concerned that affiliates using their brand name on affiliate sites are "cannabalising" their sales. Ultimate Finish - we're not stealing your traffic, we're promoting you, and to do that it helps if we mention your name! If your own site can't out rank our sites for your own brand name (assuming we're not registering domains) then try harder. If you don't like it, close your programme and see how quickly your brand name disappears from our sites.

[mrpointy]

Hi, can anyone clarify how you would get this information into the page title on the V2 client software, or is it only possible using the API?

Cheers

[IntroSites]

You can use tags in title aswell as in pages, take a look at the page titles on various pages (cats / by price / products etc) on Clothing Empire (sig below)