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USA: "Expert witness": Keyword metatag matters

 

We have seen several keyword metatag cases in the last years, way too many, considering that Google never used the information provided in the keyword metatag for ranking its search results. Nethertheless companies sued competitors for using their mark as metatag. Untill recently, they could at least claim that Google did not publically talk about it. But a few months ago, Google confirmed what was known for years in a video.
Ling Chai, the CEO of the software company Jenzabar sued the makers of a documentary, because they had used "Jenzabar" as metatag, which Jenzabar believes violates its trademark. And the company succeeded in finding an expert witness, who claims that the keyword metatag does in fact influence Google's search results! It is not clear from his statement how he has expertise in this field. We'll see if the court finds that Google is lying about his algorithm. I very much doubt it. Pretty much everyone in the search optimizing field knows that the keyword metatag does not matter to Google. And when you look at the statement of the witness, he always mentions the importance of the keyword metatag and the title of the web site. He shoud have left out the metatag and he would be right. See e.g. Nr. 26: "....it is my professional opinion that LB's incorporation of Jenzabar's registered marks, as both keyword meta-tags in the source code for pages on LB's website, together with "JENZABAR" as the title tag, is a primary reason for why Web search engines, including Google, Bing, and others rank LB's website so high on a search of the term "jenzabar".

 

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