Competition. It's a beautiful thing:)

Once in a while, we Google ourselves. We search for "neigh*borrow" and other keywords not only out of curiosity but also to see how well our pages are being indexed and what our SEO campaign looks like. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised to find a nice blog post that we hadn't seen before. Rarely do we find an unpleasant surprise as even criticism helps us learn and improve.

The other night, we found the ad below in the sponsored links section. Not only did swaptree use "neighborrow" as a keyword that they bid on (a borderline move itself) but they used our copyrighted name as the HEADLINE in their ad, basically purporting to be us! We were flattered that they feel as if they need to resort to these antics, but also annoyed. And confused (did they not think we would see it?).

You need not be familiar with Google's algorithm to see, unequivocally, the organic search results on the left and the sponsored links on the right.

Anyway, rather than waste time sending them a letter, we wanted to use this opportunity to focus on something positive. We at neigh*borrow have always tried to reach out to the brave and bright people trying to solve the same problems that we are. It's not easy to start a business from scratch, especially in an infant industry. We have nothing but respect for the fine folks at NeighborGoods, Loanables, and others attempting to use this unprecedented human interconnectivity to save financial and natural resources. We even talk to Micki and Ryan from time to time on Facebook, Twitter, etc. To them we say, keep up the good, important, difficult work!

Using a copyrighted name without permission in advertising copy such as the one above, is not only illegal and fraudulent, but a tad classless as well. We encourage our readers to Google the term "neighborrow" and click on the top organic link and the top paid link to see which one is more useful in finding you something you need to use. Enter #stcopyr along with your search!