Legal Research

Metatag Suits Should Now be Dropped

By Omar Ha-Redeye

Although SEO specialists have long denied that metatags  matter, there have been lawsuits over them for a number of reasons, including trademark infringement, attempt to divert business, and even defamation.

Dany Sullivan of Search Engine Watch outlines some of the major American suits over metatags.

Google’s Matt Cutt publicly confirmed yesterday for the first time that their search algorithm does ignore metatags.  See the video here.

Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law says,

Although occasionally judges have gotten it right (see, e.g., Standard Process v. Banks). most courts still treat the presence of a third party trademark in keyword metatags as essentially a per se trademark infringement–even if the keyword metatags didn’t (and couldn’t) change the search results ordering or any consumer’s behavior…

Now that we have confirmation that the dominant search engine disregards keyword metatags, let’s hope judges do the same.

And in anticipation of judges hopefully dismissing these cases, would-be plaintiffs should realize the futility of metatag cases and drop them so we can move on to more interesting Internet law cases.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 22, 2009 (boomark / email).