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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.
As a small scale web developer I can attest to the fact that meta-tag 'spamming' can be very effective. Google may not respond, but other engines do. As soon as that happens, up goes your Google ranking.
Of course, I don't really consider it spamming to include variations, common misspellings, etc. etc., and any search engine worth its salt will ignore repeated words in a single meta tag.
As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...
Read Pynchon.
Same argument as the CAN-SPAM act in the US. Writing a new law does not mean the referenced action is suddenly stopped or seriously reduced. It just makes legal penalties easier to prosecute after the fact.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
Since really relevant results aren't generally gained from reading meta tags, and search engines & indexers that analyse pages don't use them so much any more, it seems to be a bit like banning disk notchers for getting double the capacity out of single sided 5.25" disks. Sure you might gain some sales of 5.25" disks but... who really cares?
There will be enough people.
I don't know if this is a specialty of German law, but competitors (and special societies ? - but I think that got nuked) can "admonish" the violating party. The interesting thing is that they can demand the cost for this from the violating party.
There is quite a number of laywers making money with this and it can be e.g. pretty expensive for a German not to put his contact information on a (even partially) commercial website. And in one click range please !
No, this is not a joke.
This stuff will be enforced.
5) What about servers across national lines
From legal rulings it does only matter if you reside in Germany and /or have a business residing in Germany. I think your website must be (partially ?) directed to Germans, too, but I'm not sure about this.
So, if you have a foot in Germany and make business with Germans then you have to obey this ruling.
And, yes, such stuff IS enforced when you have your webservers outside Germany etc.
You will be sued by the aforcementioned laywers or competitors.
As a rather funny sidenote it is illegal for German businesses to use to .ag domain unless they are stock compenies (AG = Aktiengesellschaft = stock company).
1) A webcrawler bot
2) The bot can search the page content and compare the keywords in the meta tag to the words in the page. One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...
3) Use statistical analysis on the page content. The more often the keyword appears in the page the stronger it's relation probably is.
4) Some pages have dozens and dozens of keywords in the meta tag. That's probably excessive... though to be fair you could adjust the allowed number of keywords based on the amount of content (within reason)
5) It's possible, within reason, to determine the physical location of a server if it's DNS information is properly maintained... and I think there are already laws about that.
6) Damned if I know, but all of this is strictly academic anyway, because you're assuming the police will be proactive in enforcing this law. As wikdwarlock said, it's just an extra "gotcha" when they catch you for something else.
=Smidge=
Since we are talking about Germany here, I have a good idea how this is actually going to "work". Does anyone remember the whole Adobe Illustrator / KIllustrator trademark fiasco? Germany has an odd system of trademark enforcement whereby lawfirms look for trademark infringements and bring suits, telling the entity whose trademark was infringed is optional - as happened with Adobe. Naturally the real winners are the lawfirms, many of whom are bottom feeders with dubious case selection and billing practices.
You could quite easily employ the same scheme here; the lawfirms "police" the sites and bring suits against those they believe infringe. If the court decides that they are right or the defendent settles before trial, then they make money. The problem is obviously that you are going to attract the same type of ambulance chasing lawyers to the business as the trademark example, but modern legislation hardly has a good track record for being sensible, does it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
(1) publishing what exactly they consider to be a single metatag keyword (e.g. a string of alphanumeric characters)
(2) publishing that they will only process the first, say, ten metatag keywords in a document.
(3) acting accordingly
A healthy competition would evolve. Other engines would follow suit. Problem solved. No lawyers needed.
Being well balanced is overrated. -- John Carmack
I suppose if they do a search on hotbot (or whatever still uses meta-tags) for "Immanuel Kant" and get in response pages with Cartman's mom getting pooed on, they will have found one to report. As meta tag abuse is only a problem if it is visible (meaning it makes it to the first few pages of search results), it doesn't really matter if some are hidden away and get missed.
" 2) Who is going to decide that a given page has incorrect meta-keyword information
3) Define strong relation to a web page
4) Define Excessive use of meta-keywords in HTML"
I don't know about in Germany, but here the courts are given the task of interpreting the law.
" 5) What about servers across national lines"
One would think this wouldn't affect them, but remember the Yahoo! Nazi auction case.
" 6) Does anyone really use meta-keywords other than spammers"
No. But this may be done under the hope that they could return to normal use if spammers are removed from the equation.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
it should be pretty clear that this is not about ruling them illeagal to use.
just that it is wrong/unlawful to lie in them to gain visitors.
a resteurant can't put fake stuff on it's adverts to get customers into the resteurant...
would you be very pleased to buy a newspaper that's first page indexed something that intrests you, but when you open it you only notice that it's full of adverts for xxx lines and nothing else? would you think that such fraud would be legal?
how about starting to read even the blurb.. "Meta-tag keywords may still be used if they are in strong relation to the page"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Are public non-internet networks regulated by this? What if a company or organization got fed up with the way "The Internet" was being regulated and wanted to create a new/entirely separate network to bring back the "good ol' days" of the net..?
There is one state in the US (I can't remember which) where if your car unsettles a horse, you have to pull over to the side of the road and stop you engine. If the horse is still alarmed by your car, you have to dismantle it and hide it in the bushes.
This is exactly the same class of law. Stupid, stupid, and stupid. It's already out of date, because so few search engines use Meta tags to index content anymore.
-- Hulver's site
The Joe Gutnick ruling in australia (american site sued in australia under australian laws for defamation. Since site can be read in australia, the court held that the defamation happened in australia) pretty much opens the door for jurastiction shopping around the world.
And just cos your country dont recognise that countries rules, doesnt mean that you aint gunna find your bank balance empty one day.
Welcome to legal hell.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
websites targeted at german people most probably. the same kind of cases that would apply when you were advertising for german people(with false promises. like advertising "free repair kits for vw's" when you were just trying to sell them porno magazines..).
besides, it would only apply in the obvious situations where you're for example claiming that you're a windows helping site or something when all that you were trying to do would be to put some pr0n advertising spyware on the visitors computer, it's a no brainer that such activity should indeed be illeagal(luring 'customers' with false promises).
just carry on as usual
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
One would think that a page with "watermelon" in the meta tag would at least mention it in the page itself...
Not a safe assumption. Let's say you write a page about Fermat's theorem... You might include the phrase "number theory" in the meta tags, but not mention it anywhere on the page itself. That would not count as either an oversight in the page text, nor a misuse of meta tags.
However, I have a somewhat strange thought on ways around the court's ruling... They only said that the meta tags need to fit the page's content. So what if the page specifically displays its own meta tags at the bottom? They would then match the page (even to a law-bot).
Overall, due to the vagueness and ease of circumvention, I would consider this a more-or-less meaningless ruling. It may provide a precedent for future tangentially-related trials, but I highly doubt we can apply it to the idea of spam-police going around searching for improper use of meta tags.