Case No. EWHC-941-(IPEC)

57.An important part of the case related to Muzmatch’s SEO activities in the period from January 2012 to January 2020. Mr Younas’ evidence was that, in around January 2012, he put in place an SEO strategy copied from that used by the SingleMuslim.com dating website. He explained that the strategy involved making a list of some 5000 words or word combinations (referred to as “keywords”) that related in some way to Muslim marriage or Muslim matchmaking. A page, known as a landing page, was then created on the Muzmatch website for each of these keywords. These landing pages would be indexed by search engines, such as Google, so that a user who carried out a search using one of those keywords would be presented with search results which included a link which, if clicked on, took the user to the relevant landing page on Muzmatch’s website. Muzmatch accepts that the aim of its SEO strategy was to promote and increase visits to its website.58.Mr Younas’ evidence was that the list of keywords that he adopted in January 2012 was copied from the SingleMuslim.com list (albeit that he scanned through it to ensure that there was nothing that was offensive or an obvious outlier). Although the word “match” was not of itself a keyword, there were some 132 keywords that contained that word, including, for example, “match-muslim”, “muslimmatch”, “muslim-match” and “UK-muslim-match” with, sometimes, a country reference (e.g. Afghanistan or Albania, etc.). However, Mr Younas’ evidence (which I accept) was that in creating his list of keywords, he did not think about Match.com or the Match Group. He pointed out that if he had wished to mislead people or to suggest that Muzmatch was a Muslim version of the Match brand, he would have included “match.com” in the list, but he had not done that. I will return to this point later, but it is noteworthy that the list of keywords does include keywords such as Singlemuslim, Shaadi, SimplyMarry, Salaam Love and Asian Flames, which are the names of other dating or introduction websites.59.In around March 2015, Mr Younas revisited the list of keywords to include keywords more related to mobile apps such as “muslim-app” and “muslim-mobile”. It does not appear that Mr Younas added any more keywords containing the word “match”. However, he did add “muslim-tinder”, “tinder” and “halal-tinder” as keywords. The word “tinder” was clearly not a word relating to or describing Muslim marriage or Muslim matchmaking. Indeed, as set out above, Muzmatch now accepts the use of such keywords infringed Match’s trade marks in the Tinder Marks. 60.The following is an example of a landing page for a search using the keyword “UK Muslim Match”. As can be seen, that search term is set out prominently at the top of the landing page and is then repeated three times in the subsequent text. Although this particular page was dated 4 October 2018, it is probable that it would have been in substantially the same form in 2012. Certainly, Mr Younas does not suggest that he had altered the wording of the landing pages. 61.It is not clear exactly how many users, having carried out a search on the keywords in issue, would have clicked through to these landing pages. As Mr Austen pointed out, this data was available to Muzmatch (but not to Match) using the Google Analytics tool but it was not produced. In the absence of Google Analytics data, Match relied on a report from its own SEO agency (Clustaar) for the period starting in January 2017 and ending 25 September 2021. This report contained data obtained by use of the SEMRUSH tool. It shows the actual position (or ranking) that various links to Muzmatch’s website achieved when a search was carried out using the keywords in issue. Then, on the basis of that ranking, the report provided estimates of the volume of searches that would have been carried out in order to achieve that ranking and of how many of those searches would have resulted in the searcher clicking through to the relevant landing page on Muzmatch’s website. 62.The report concluded that there had been some 32,770 searches carried out in respect of the URLs “muzmatch.com/”, “muzmatch.com/single-muslim-marriage-uk-muslim-match” and “muzmatch.com/single-muslim-marriage-muslim-match-making” and that these led to a total of 11,725 click throughs to the relevant landing pages on Muzmatch’s website. 63.Whilst these figures are estimates, they are based on the actual ranking of the links to the Muzmatch website as they appeared in the search results. In my judgment, they show that there were a substantial number of searches on keywords that included the word “match” and that a reasonably substantial number of users clicked through from that link to the landing pages on the Muzmatch website. Given that achieving such click throughs was the entire purpose of the SEO strategy that Muzmatch operated for almost 10 years and given the absence of any evidence from Muzmatch on this issue, I see no reason not to accept these figures.