It seems ludicrous that one should be concerned with people using your name or your business name to rank within Google, but lets look into this further for a moment and find out why someone would do this ?
In this article i explore How to Deal With a Competitor Using Your Trademark or Name in Google.
I visited the website of an acquaintance of mine and noticed that they used their name in the keywords and meta description as well as other places, i thought to myself why would someone do this ? Why would you want to be ranked for your own name ? It really depends i guess on your business model this website in question actually had his name in the domain name also and the website was more of a personal blog rather than a general business website. In doing some research i found many complaints of people abusing the use of names as keywords to rank higher in Google for that phrase to either defame a person or simply to come up higher in the rankings of Google for someone elses name, possibly your competitor.
Can you imagine how degrading it would be if someone started using your name as keywords in their website only to talk about about you or your business ? How would you deal with it ? You could ask the webmaster of that offending website to take down that content but i would highly doubt they would comply in the first place but it looks like you have some ammunition to resolve this problem.
How to Deal With a Competitor Using Your Trademark or Name in Google
Google has trademark violation policies in place which recently in European countries does not exist anymore however it is still in effect in Australia which is great news for us aussies. Take a look at the following links from Google to learn and even file a complaint against a website if they are using your name or trademark in Google Adwords Campaigns if your lucky Google with promptly remove the offending ads from their systems so they wont show anymore and probably tell the owner of the website to remove the material entirely or they wont be crawled by Google again.
Google’s Trademark Policy for Australia
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6118
Updates to Google Trademark Policy for Other Countries
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177578
Google’s Trademark Policy Investigation Procedures for Australia
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=144298
File a Trademark Complaint Now
https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint
Summary: How to Deal With a Competitor Using Your Trademark or Name in Google
If you find someone or a business who is using your personal name (full name) or your business name you may have a leg to stand on and you have the right to put forward a complaint to Google for investigation.
Some other strategies i would put in place would be to start using your full name as SEO content on your website this way you will achieve higher rankings in Google if someone happened to type your name into Google, this also holds true for your business name. Remember its not about getting ranked number 1 for your business name or your personal name this should not be your primary goal i would only do this if it so happened that there were other websites out there that actually rank in Google in the first place. If you happen to rank on the first page in Google already then you should have nothing to worry about.
