Spammy brand mentions

[EveryMatrix]

Hi guys,

Recently I started to receive via Google Alerts a lot of brand mentions on obviously spammy pages/websites like this http://www.iconshut.com/business-cards-every-matrix-has-recently-gone-through-a-rebranding--icons/

Where Every Matrix (EveryMatrix) is our brand name. It have first noticed it a few weeks ago but I started to receive this kind of alerts almost daily. There are no links pointing back to our website so I can not disavow them at least.

Since it could be a negative SEO attempt, my feelings are that this kind of mentions (https://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions) will hurt on the long run and I'm concerned that I can not control it or at least I don't know how to do it.

What is you take on this? What can we do?

[GPainter]

"There are no links pointing back to our website"

I honestly wouldn't worry, you can't control everything that is said about you and as long as there isn't any negative looking links or the stuff is out ranking your brand terms then i wouldn't worry. I can imagine your customers are not looking at some of the sites any way so focus on who would read the stuff and will it affect their opinion of you and does it matter?

If you do have some worry you can always start to put out your own PR to put out better stuff that might help you.

Good luck and I hope that put your mind at ease a bit.

[EGOL]

I don't think that it is negative SEO.  It is simply a weasel who is grabbing your icons and offering them to anybody anywhere to use for free.

If that icon is your intellectual property, and you have not released them to the public (this website says that you released them with a creative commons license), and if you don't want them distributed by this website, you can contact them to remove it and stop using your icons.  If they do not obey or do not respond you can submit a DMCA complaint to google and they will drop that image or that page from search.  You can do the same with their hosting company and do the same with adsense or another ad network that they are using.

I submit dozens of complaints about weasels every month.

Warning:  don't do this unless you know that these icons are your property and you can prove it and you have not released them under any type of license.  You can get sued if you get this guy's pages removed from google, his hosting turned off or get his adsense account shut down.   Just letting your know that you have recourse that should only be used with great caution.

[EveryMatrix]

Thanks guys for responses.

@Chris
We do send out a fair share of PRs (we are a B2B software/platform provider) but considering the amount of spammy brand mentions I see lately on completely unrelated pages and based on assumption (https://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions) that Google (now or in the future) may consider this kind of brand mention as a ranking factor ... so yeah, I'm more concerned about long term negative impact that this proportion could have on our rankings.

@EGOL
The link I showed was a random pick from a long list of unrelated pages mentioning our brand name that started to show up lately. Is not about stealing our content or anything like that ... just random pages. Today can be a page talking about icons, tomorrow other subject ... the domains look random as well.

[EGOL]

Today can be a page talking about icons, tomorrow other subject ...

Thanks.  My biggest problem is image theft.

There are a lot of sites doing this with my brand.  I don't think it is worth doing anything about, and I don't think it is malicious - unless they are using your brand name and your content in a bad way or to attract traffic to ad-filled pages that should have been coming to your site.  But these sites generally do not rank well.

Today can be a page talking about icons, tomorrow other subject ...