I won the game...but wait!

[fawlty]

Hi Everyone:
Some advice needed. I have a hotel in Costa Rica that is less than a year old. Before I came to start the hotel, I searched for names for the hotel, and guess what, there was no Hotel Costa Rica. Brilliant, I will name my hotel Hotel Costa Rica and I will just kill in the search engine game. I bought the domain name hotelcostarica.org then moved to Costa Rica. When I got here, I was informed by a lawyer that, "you can't do that". The name Hotel Costa Rica couldn't be used.

So I renamed it the Banana Tree Hotel. I kept the domain hotelcostarica.org and bought bananatreehotel.com and spent my time on the banana side of things.

Fast forward 10 months.

I still suck in google but, yahoo with their new methodology, has placed me in number 1 and 2 positions for the term "Costa Rica Hotel" Wow! 3 million pages and untold number of searchers on this keyword and I've got the number 1 and 2 positions - life couldn't get better. But wait...

They are for the hotelcostarica site and the number 1 spot for the coveted term "Costa Rica Hotel" is for the Italian translation of the site.

What to do.

I have links on the old domain to the new domain but want to know if there is a better way. Should I use a page re-direct, copy and paste the banana page onto the hotel costa rica site, or do nothing at all?

Thanks,
Fawlty

[melaniejk]

Hi Fawlty.
I'm curious, why couldn't you name the Hotel Hotel Costa Rica?
I know your lawyer told you that, but what was his reason?
Thank you.

[fawlty]

It's Costa Rica. I'm a gringo so I'm not hip to the copyright trademark rules here. Anyway, the odd thing is that even though the old site is inactive (I started the new one a month and a half after I started the old one), the bananatree site gets 4 times as many visitors and ranks lower than the hotel costa rica site.

Fawlty