Revisiting Meta Tagging With Intent — Sharp Practice Or Smart Practice?

First published in LexisNexis Internet Law Bulletin, June 2008

Your client is a big corporate with a big reputation in the real world — its brand is very valuable. It doesn't need to rely on website optimisation to attract new customers.

Its trading name is a registered trade mark and is frequently used by its competitors when meta tagging their own websites. The effect of this is has been (though it is becoming less significant as search engine technology becomes more sophisticated), that when somebody searches your client's trading name, search engines such as Google will include competitors' sites in the search results, with the possibility that searchers (among them potential new customers) will be effectively diverted to the competitors' offerings.