My startup is being impersonated all across the board, help?!
Whats up Guys,
A couple of months back I announced to the "world" ( IH, HN, PH, etc lol) about the development of my new startup "www.Yspott.com". Back then I didn't bother with "conventional social media" in the sense that I didn't create any social media handles or accounts for my startups ( Instagram, Google.blog, Twitter, etc) -->(big mistake)
Funny thing is, one of journalist I am working with, approached me a couple of days ago with this question: " Are you also doing religious work... from Africa with Yspott?"
WHAT?!
He showed me a quick google search. Apparently, there is a lady in Africa that deliberately went and adopted the name "Yspott" ( which is a totally made up name I came up with ) into all of her social media ( Instagram, blog, twitter, etc) and deliberately put my company's link in her profile/bio.
Before purchasing my domain name - a couple of months back- I did a quick search to make sure nobody else had it. I did come across this lady and her religious blog named " Yspo!" and thought "Well is not really close to my name so it shouldn't be an issue". Apparently, she saw my company's name on google after I publish my first outreach post and decided it was a good idea to instead change all of her "Yspo!" stuffs for "Yspott" since she would get way more traffic.
I reached out to Twitter, Instagram, and her in order to have an action taken without success. It may not seem like a huge issue, but when a client or anyone does a quick search on google, if they are not -very- careful they will land in a religious post/blog form Africa, instead of my site.
I wouldn't usually post this sort of articles since I rather solve them in a more diplomatic manner. But I've done everything I could and still got no results, so I wanted to see if any of you had experienced this sort of event before, and if you did, how did you solve it? Thanks!
I’ve experienced this before—to extreme lengths. At one point, three different “companies” had copied our website code, from top to bottom. They even used our bios—but swapped their names for ours.
That said, it’s probably not as big of a deal as it seems to you, at this moment. First of all, those social media handles are commonly inaccessible. So, you could just use @yspottHQ or @helloyspott as a place to put your stuff. Once you start linking to those, your audience will follow those accounts.
Also, you could just change your name. Change it to www.yspottt.com, grab all the social media handles, and be done with it.
Wow I'm sorry to hear your story, you definitely had it way worse. Hmm you are right, I'll just experiment with other handles. Thanks for the insights, much appreciated.
Cheers!
At the time, it was concerning, but it turned out to of little concern. My bet is that you’ll experience the same.
I consider most of these matters forms of distraction. I tend to do better by ignoring them, and instead focusing on servicing customers.
As your SEO grows, and you get published on more websites, her search results will get pushed further and fruther.
For now, at the very least, you can disavow the links from her to you:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1
Not sure if Bing, Yahoo, etc. have similar options.
Does anyone know more about the implications of disavowing a link from a major social media site?
Interesting, I have yet to try to disavow the links, I'll give it a look. Thanks for your answer!!
Create more content for your site and rank for all related queries. The intersection between {yspott, parking} and {yspott, religion} is nonexistent. I don't think anyone searching for you will make that mistake.
As for social media, she's entitled to name her accounts "yspott," especially if no one had registered the accounts beforehand. Maybe register handles like @YspottParking.
This doesn't seem like it will have a material impact on your business - you can move past this quickly :) Good luck
Your suggestions make quite the lot of sense. You are right, I should just focus on building.
Thanks for your response :)
Do you have a trademark? Are you too far in to change names?
Nope, I don't have an actual trademark. I was just getting started and didn't want to take on " unnecessary cost" back then. I could change the name... but I quite reluctant of doing so tbh.
Oh men, that sucks. Have you contacted this lady?
Yup. I’ve tried reach out to her in all of her social media accounts..and of course she never answers back.
So weird. I can't imagine what are her motivations. Trying to appear legit maybe?
I wish you best of luck, horrible situation
Thanks :)
Her account on Twitter dates back to 2012. Your company is "couple of months old".
She clearly had no idea in 2012 that you'll name your company that way.
She might even have owned yspott.com. According to http://huntexpired.net/domain/yspott.com the domain lapsed in Jan 2017
So chill out, she did nothing wrong.
I will have to respectfully disagree with your statement.
-She changed her twitter handle after my first public outreach. - How do I know this? because she left her old twitter handle in one of her old religious posts from two years ago.
-Her blog on google was Yspo!..I saw it my self a couple of months ago. Then she went and deliberately change the name of her blog to "Yspott" and proceed to link my company's site in all of her social media. How do I know this, because when I first build yspott, there were close to zero results on google except for the press and outreach that I had done myself.
Now out of nowhere the 3rd result on google is her twitter account which previously wasn't there .. and why? well,because she went and backlinked my page to her profile.
Why she deliberately and "out of nowhere" made all of these changes? I don't know, perhaps to get exposure by using the traffic form my company or perhaps is some other unknown motive.
Did you try filing for an impersonation ticket with twitter etc ?
Yeah, I tried that as well with no avail
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