Shelby's latest lawsuit, who's next?

[JKleiner]

Curious and completely ignorant re: metatags. How are the terms to be used as tags determined? Is it by the site owner; say XYZ widget & nutcracker emporium.com has tags of widgets, nutcracker, walnut. Were those tags decided upon and "connected to" the site by XYZ Inc., the search engine or ???
Are the terms elmariachi posted all of the tags for FFR? If so, where do grounds for a matatag suit come from? I don't see "shelby"; "cobra" is actually Ford property.
Educate me please.

Jeff

Jeff

[vanoochka]

Originally Posted by JKleiner

Curious and completely ignorant re: metatags. How are the terms to be used as tags determined? Is it by the site owner; say XYZ widget & nutcracker emporium.com has tags of widgets, nutcracker, walnut. Were those tags decided upon and "connected to" the site by XYZ Inc., the search engine or ???
Are the terms elmariachi posted all of the tags for FFR? If so, where do grounds for a matatag suit come from? I don't see "shelby"; "cobra" is actually Ford property.
Educate me please.

Jeff

Jeff

Meta tags are included in the pages of a website and determined by the owner/contoller of the site. If you're curious, just select "Source" under the "View" pull-down on your browser's tool bar when on any website and look for a line of code that looks like the one in bold, below.

Sticking to your example, I pulled the tags from a site that sells a Hillary Clinton nutcracker: <meta name="keywords" content="nutcracker, Hillary Clinton, Hillary, hilary, nutcraker, democratic, hillary nuts, political, novelty, walnut, cracker, Fun With Nuts, Hillary Nutcracker, Clinton Nutcracker, Ann Coulter, nuts, political gift">

From the inclusion of "Ann Coulter", I'm guessing that the owner of this site believes that people interested in Ann Coulter would be likely to buy a Hillary nutcracker. To illustrate how little meta tags alone influence search results, I typed "Ann Coulter" into three different search engines. The Hillary nutcracker site didn't rank within the first five pages on any of the results. Who normally searches deeper than five pages?

In the early days of the web, meta tags were extremely influential in web page rankings. The search engines quickly adjusted to a ranking system based on other factors, more difficult for a website owner to manipulate.

[vanoochka]

Originally Posted by JKleiner

Curious and completely ignorant re: metatags. How are the terms to be used as tags determined? Is it by the site owner; say XYZ widget & nutcracker emporium.com has tags of widgets, nutcracker, walnut. Were those tags decided upon and "connected to" the site by XYZ Inc., the search engine or ???
Are the terms elmariachi posted all of the tags for FFR? If so, where do grounds for a matatag suit come from? I don't see "shelby"; "cobra" is actually Ford property.
Educate me please.

Jeff

Jeff

Meta tags are included in the pages of a website and determined by the owner/contoller of the site. If you're curious, just select "Source" under the "View" pull-down on your browser's tool bar when on any website and look for a line of code that looks like the one in bold, below.

Sticking to your example, I pulled the tags from a site that sells a Hillary Clinton nutcracker: <meta name="keywords" content="nutcracker, Hillary Clinton, Hillary, hilary, nutcraker, democratic, hillary nuts, political, novelty, walnut, cracker, Fun With Nuts, Hillary Nutcracker, Clinton Nutcracker, Ann Coulter, nuts, political gift">

From the inclusion of "Ann Coulter", I'm guessing that the owner of this site believes that people interested in Ann Coulter would be likely to buy a Hillary nutcracker. To illustrate how little meta tags alone influence search results, I typed "Ann Coulter" into three different search engines. The Hillary nutcracker site didn't rank within the first five pages on any of the results. Who normally searches deeper than five pages?

In the early days of the web, meta tags were extremely influential in web page rankings and website owners loaded their pages with as many tags as they could come up with to rank higher in search results. The search engines quickly adjusted by devising ranking systems that more heavily weigh other factors that are more difficult for website owners to manipulate. In fact, most engines now penalize sites that overload their tags.

[elmariachi]

Originally Posted by zzmac

And if they are irrelevant, they shouldn't have a bearing on this case. (Not a lawyer but I watch Judge Judy a lot) :-)

Fair point. This is a weak contention where the suit is concerned, IMO.

Originally Posted by JKleiner

Are the terms elmariachi posted all of the tags for FFR? If so, where do grounds for a matatag suit come from? I don't see "shelby"; "cobra" is actually Ford property.
Educate me please.Jeff

I pulled those tags from the FFR site last night when I posted them. Meta tags and keywords are determined by the site owners based on their SEO strategy. For those who want to understand the incredibly boring history of meta tags and search engine optimization, go here.

While Cobra is Ford property, Shelby has an exclusive license to its use in conjunction with his own brands. So, he can certainly make a claim via the lawsuit, though it may not hold water.