How to get lots of web traffic using cheap, dodgy tactics

David Cochrane of Politics.ie owns this one.

Amas's Aileen O'Toole has started a project called Ideas Campaign. Its aim is to stop the country whinging about our troubles and to encourage us to focus our energy on solutions rather than griping.

But, following an appearance on Prime Time by O'Toole last month, a Labour Senator, Alan Kelly, bought the adwords 'Aileen O'Toole' to promote a conference he is running to support his European Parliament election campaign.

O'Toole blogged that this was a little off-side, as did Cochrane.

Aside form the cheek of doing this, his conference and website is a straight rip-off of O'Toole's. Check both and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I suppose one could argue that the more websites and campaigns out there that try to foster new thinking about our problems, the better. But as Cochrane points out, this smacks of opportunism more than genuine altruism.

In fairness to Kelly, he has now withdrawn the 'Aileen O'Toole' adwords.

Comments

[le craic]

Jumping on the keywords was stupid, but saying his site is a ripoff of the ideas campaign - not so sure about that. As you say, the more ideas that get generated the better, but when did he launch his site / register the domain - whois data points to similar times in Feb for .ie registration?

Incidentally David McWilliams just started a "Your Ideas" on his site yesterday.

[Adrian Weckler]

Le Craic,

According to David Cochrane, Kelly registered newideas.ie two days after campaignideas.ie was registered.

Copying an idea is not a hanging offence, granted. The registration of O'Toole's name was a bit much, however.

[le craic]

With the .ie domains, the date that shows up in the registry is the date of approval from the IEDR. The actual application process can begin well before that - e.g. one .ie domain I registered recently took 2 weeks to get approved whereas another one only took a couple of days. anyway, it's neither here nor there and seems to be a storm in a teacup on p.ie - but totally agree the adwords campaign tacking onto the name is wrong.

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