Our name "BDSM Circle" is being stolen!

Latest developement:

It started a few month ago with our French sister site "Le Cercle BDSM". Then, lately, we have been receiving email from people who "want to be nice to us" by warning us in advance that they are ready to buy some of the other BDSMCircle extension (.cn or .biz....), but, if we pay them "compensation" they are ready to "not buy the extension of our name!"

There is a technical name for what they are doing, but, in my book, it is call "Blackmailing".

We wasted a lot of time trying to defend ourselves against this with no success!

We refuse to fall for this type of blackmail so, expect "other" BDSMCircle to be created by these people.

At this moment, our best defense is to inform you all about this situation. Remember that our BDSM Circle website is a free none commercial website belonging to Pierre and Catharine. It is about our love of BDSM, not about offering you all stuff and service in exchange of money.

Why are we having problems.

The reason is very simple; we have been on the net for over 9 years. For what it is worth, search engine loves us and we have good rating with them. We should not be so "popular" with the search engine because of the type of site and some of the technique use in it's management, but, we still do good with them. This situation creates questions in my mind; Are we that successful that it is worth for some to try to steal our visitors? Damn! We are just a small personal website!!!

Crazy no?

Below this text, there is a translation of an article we had to put up October 17th 2009 on our sister French website. This will explain why and when all this nonsense started.

We will continue to maintain our site, the way it is. We are working on new articles and when they will be ready, the site will be updated with them.

Pierre and Catharine

December 24th, 2009

Our site called "Le Cercle BDSM", the French speaking sister site has been stolen. Companies from France stole the name by just changing the url a bit.

Before I go on, let me just give you a bit of the history about the name "Cercle BDSM". In 1998, I was having, among other things, cyber play with a French submissive called "Yona". From our cyber play, we created a site called "Les aventures de Pete et Yona" (The adventure of Pete and Yona). In the story of our adventure, we had a club called "Le Cercle BDSM" where some of the action was taking place. So, when in 2000, Catharine and I wanted a website to share our love of BDSM, the name "Le Cercle BDSM" was back in service and we created the English side of our site: "the BDSM Circle".

Since then, after a few changes in 2001-2002, our site took its look that it has now. Since the beginning, we were fortunate to have a wonderful circle of friends visiting us regularly, slowly building our reputation among our visitors.

Alas, things are changing.

Since a few years, we have witness other sites using the name "Cercle BDSM" being created on the net. We didn't really mind because, we believed at the times that our circle of friends would know who are the people behind the real "Le Cercle BDSM (BDSM Circle)".

It seems that things are not that simple now. Lately we have received emails of complaints about our services!!!!!!!! What services????? We are a free site!!!!!

After an exchange of emails with the authors of the complaints emails, we were able to understand that....they thought they were writing the other Cercle BDSM!!!!!!!! It seems that the other sites copycat sites don't care about quality of service from what we have seen in those emails, worst! These sites, under the pretense of being free, they hide poor quality pay services!

It gets worst!

A site with whom we traded links wrote us to complain that we had removed the link towards their sites! Yes, you guess it; they visited the wrong "Cercle BDSM"!

Because of this, we are now, losing the trust of visitors and partners because of the others "Cercle BDSM sites".

How is this possible?

There is a technique called "Cyber squatting" or to be more precise "typo squatting". The technique is simple; you take a name that have a certain success, change the name just a bit so when people type the name in search engines, you get "easy hits" because you are leeching on a successful name, the goal, an easy way to get "hits" on your website without having to build a reputation.. For instance, we all know Google, the search engine, right? Now try Goggle (with two "G")......... This technique is obviously of bad taste and dishonest but we did our research and it is legal. We could hire lawyers to defend ourselves like we have been defending our copyrights for our material for a while now, but to hire lawyers to defend our name in France is way to expensive to do.

The only thing left to do for us is to warn you, but, we are already hurting since we know for a fact that because of the "other Cercle BDSM sites", we have lost the trust of some. For those who are aware of this situation, they write us to cheer us to continue what we do, but loosing the trust of our visitors is a big problem for us, because when people visit and write us, this is what give us the energy to maintain our site. If nobody comes to visit us anymore, there will be no point for us to continue! And to add to the injury, it is clear that anything we are going to do to make our site better will profit the other copycat sites, making this situation worst!

We've been on the net for 9 years. We feel that we have barely touched the subject of BDSM, there are so much we want to share with you! What is the point of trying to make our site the best we can, if nobody visit us!

We are sadden by this situation.

Pierre and Catharine, lovers of BDSM

October 17th, 2009

Navigation:

To go to the welcome page (top page) of our site.

© THE BDSM CIRCLE - LE CERCLE BDSM 2009