Is this brand bidding ?

[GCG]

My account is locked with bet365 because I have this webiste url : http://www.bonus365.co.uk/

They noticed that this is brand bidding and in breach of terms and conditions becasue I reviewed their site & games mainly to rank for their brand.

2.5 Bidding on Brand Terms
You may not purchase or register keywords, search terms or other identifiers for use in any search engine, portal, sponsored advertising service or other search or referral service and which are identical or similar to any of bet365's trade marks or otherwise include the word "bet365", “bet365poker”, “bet365casino” or variations thereof, or include metatag keywords on the Partner Site which are identical or similar to any of bet365’s trade marks.

Also the site had a similar green color scheme (my designer wanted to do me a favor : thanks buddy LOL!).

So my question is one can not have the number 365 in the domain name when promoting their brand as this is a violation of T&C's, or maybe not ?

What if I had bonusbet.co.uk e.g. and only reviewed them because I have no other sportsbook aff. account?

Just want to have opinions on this.

FYI

I deleted all the stuff - including banners & links from my main site where I reviewed them too.

[F-L-C]

Unfortunately you definitely broke the terms and conditions with the url, you can't blame your designer buddy for this one

[GCG]

ok no problem just want to make sure.

[Muppet]

I would say no. You have not included any of the specific trademarks they included in their terms. It is not identical, and the only similarity is the number 365. This is another case (like 32 Red) of trying to claim overreaching ownership over a generic term in a domain name. They were far from the first to put "365" in a business or domain name and they won't be the last.

When will they be going after football365.com? Its a very well known and established football news site. It has loads of ads for football betting on there. My guess is never, because I am sure they have enough money to defend themselves.

What about the live365.com radio network?

You know why I picked those two? Google "365" and see how they outrank Bet365. If I were Bet365 I would watch out - perhaps those more highly ranked and visible sites might decide that they don't like Bet365 using 365 in THEIR domain name. Wouldn't that be karmic coincidence?

[TheGooner]

It's clearly not "brand bidding" - because you are not bidding - that is to say purchasing or registering keywords. Additionally, that clause does not seem to explicitly state that bet365 think that the number 365 is a "keyword in itself.

I agree with Mr Muppet - that the appearance of 365 in a domain name does not automatically mean that it's a squat. After all 365 days in a year means that there are many valid useful variants that have nothing to do with Bet365.

However, the 365 part of your domain could easily be construed as potentially "brand squatting" if you have adopted a green colour scheme, and are heavily promoting Bet365 using their banners and logos. Green, UK, betting, 365 - yep sounds like Bet365 to me.

IF you had made Bonus365 bright RED and given it the tagline "Bonus Betting all year round" and made it about bonus codes and bets that people can get from a whole lot of places then I would have said it WAS NOT a brand squat either.

(DISCLAIMER : I can't review your old site to check - you seem to have redirected it to a new URL?)

[GCG]

Thanks Muppet good post !

However, the 365 part of your domain could easily be construed as potentially "brand squatting" if you have adopted a green colour scheme, and are heavily promoting Bet365 using their banners and logos. Green, UK, betting, 365 - yep sounds like Bet365 to me.

IF you had made Bonus365 bright RED and given it the tagline "Bonus Betting all year round" and made it about bonus codes and bets that people can get from a whole lot of places then I would have said it WAS NOT a brand squat either.

(DISCLAIMER : I can't review your old site to check - you seem to have redirected it to a new URL?)

@ Gooner : you are 100% correct the color scheme was their color, I did not have a template so my writer used a green one, which at that time looked ok. I never thought that could be an issue seeing both so many sites promoting them with a similar color scheme.
If I had made it an ugly blog greyish site and did not use their keywords they would probably left me alone.
Yeah I deleted the content and redirected the site as my account was locked.
I could rewrite / create a new template and all but with 12k in the red it is not a very tempting thing to do.

[slotplayer]

nextag did that to my retail site. they had Google Adwords running with my full domain name as the ad heading.
I contacted nextag and they removed it. There was some other site not in the USA doing the same but they ignored my request.

there is a domain called googleit.com but site is called Go Ogle IT

[Vrindavan]

what about a site naturalhealth365 dot com ?

[PingPong]

does it mean we cannot use bet365 in meta tags at all?
meta keywords only or Title & description too?