Meta-tag Spam Declared Illegal in Germany

Philipp Lenssen writes "According to Heise.de, a German court ruled excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML unlawful. Meta-tag keywords may still be used if they are in strong relation to the page. The decision does not address more popular search engine spamming methods of today (as meta-keywords are ignored by Google, they are rarely used as core strategy for Search Engine Optimization)." <update> Thanks to Michael Mol for the translation to English pointer.

Comments

Obviously, this makes no sense

[CompSci101]

I used to think that only we in the good ol' USA could come up with ridiculous judgments like this (the never-ending innovation in legal interpretation). Nice to see insanity is a generally human condition. Hopefully, this won't pass muster in the US under Freedom Of Speech, but I'm not hopeful (has our Justice Department / Judiciary given anyone hope recently? Just curious...)

It seems redundant to post on Slashdot that this is senseless legislation. I'm sure everyone here would clearly agree that legislating on the merits/legality of <meta> tags is absurd.

What really bothers me about this is that this is a judgment specifically to address a shortcoming in a commercial product! What, just because everybody loves Google and uses it every day some court is going to decide that it's illegal to put particular kinds of content on your website because -- uh, oh! -- Google doesn't know how to fairly rank sites containing this content?

Clearly, all one needs to do is become popular enough -- the courts will eventually find a way to bend the system to suit you. And, yes, I'm leveling this at e-mail, too, although at least in that case you're being harassed externally by a business you don't want to have contact with. Here, a robot is (uninvitedly) scouring your webpages to figure out where things are on the web, and isn't smart enough to figure out that you have a lot of crap on your website. The system is clearly broken, and yet instead of trying to fix the blatant technical problems we're trying to legislate them away.

What next? Make it illegal to have invisible blocks of text that just have the same word over and over to get a better ranking with full-text search?

Why not build a better search engine?

C