When SEO Works Too Well: A Verification Service’s Run-In With a Trademark Complaint

For years, the search engine optimization playbook for small online businesses has been simple: find out what people are searching for and build a page that answers it. For Get SMS Online, a provider of temporary phone numbers for SMS verification, that playbook worked almost too well.

The company sells short-term numbers that people use to receive verification codes when signing up for online services. It had built a collection of landing pages, each dedicated to a specific platform. The logic was straightforward. Someone searching for a temporary number for a particular service would land on a page about exactly that, buy a number, receive a code and move on.

One of those pages targeted a popular dating app. The app’s name appeared in the page address, the title, the main heading and throughout the text. By the usual SEO standards, it was a textbook page.

Then the complaint arrived.

A Complaint About a Word

The notice came through Cloudflare, which forwarded a trademark infringement complaint filed by an agent acting for the trademark owner. It listed the registered mark, its registration number, the trademark office, the URL in question and a request for immediate removal.

According to the company, the page did not use the dating service’s logo, claim any affiliation or sell access to the service itself. It sold temporary phone numbers for SMS verification and explained that they could receive an OTP message from that platform.

“They didn’t complain that we were pretending to be them,” the company wrote in a blog post describing the episode. “They complained about a word.”

The company compares the situation to a shoe retailer receiving a complaint over a page about a manufacturer’s running shoes that it actually sells, or an auto parts store being flagged for listing brake pads for a specific car model.

Safe, But Invisible

Rather than contest the complaint, the company removed the page, deciding that one landing page was not worth a legal fight. It then reworked its whole site, replacing service-specific pages with broader categories such as email providers and dating platforms, and adding a site-wide disclaimer stating that it is not affiliated with the brands it mentions.

The legal risk went away. So did a large share of the traffic.

“From a legal-enforcement perspective, everything was wonderfully quiet,” the company wrote. “From an SEO perspective, exactly the opposite.”

A Common Tactic, an Uncommon Email

The episode highlights a tension that many online retailers live with. Search engines reward pages that name exactly what a user is looking for, and product names are often trademarks. Electronics shops publish compatibility pages for specific motherboards, accessory sellers list chargers by laptop brand, and parts retailers organize their catalogs by car model.

In the United States, describing compatibility with another company’s product is often defended under a legal concept known as nominative fair use. But that defense has limits, and it rarely comes into play at the stage where a hosting or security provider forwards a complaint. For a small business, taking a page down is usually cheaper than arguing the point.

The company says competitors in its niche still run hundreds of pages built around individual service names. Why its page drew a complaint while others did not remains unclear, and the company acknowledges it has no evidence of who flagged it.

The Lesson

The takeaway, according to the company, is not that brands protect their trademarks. It is how easily routine optimization can drift into territory that attracts legal attention. A dedicated page for one platform leads to another, and then another, until a site has effectively built what the company jokingly calls “a very efficient trademark-detection machine.”

Tell A Bot, the SMS verification service that received the complaint, has been merged with Get SMS Online, and both now run on the same platform. The company’s full account of the incident is available on its blog.

In the end, the SEO did its job. Google understood what the page was about. Unfortunately, so did the trademark owner.