A couple of influential court cases in the US have been decided, however, they differ on the overall outcome when it comes to use of trademarked words in META data including keywords constitute trademark infringement.
North American Medical Corp. v. Axiom Worldwide, Inc.
But in this case, I do not think Axiom denied placing those terms in their meta tags. The question Goldman has is, did the meta tags influence the site to rank for those terms? Google has told us they ignore the keywords meta tag, but said they do use the meta description tag. But would the meta description tag alone be enough to rank a site for? Hard to say. But if you add some links to the equation, then it is a no brainer. Search Engine Land
Although Axiom’s website never displayed NAM’s trademarked terms to visitors and never mentioned NAM or NAM’s products, Axiom nonetheless included the terms within its meta tags to influence Internet search engines. For instance, evidence in this case indicated that, before Axiom removed these meta tags from its website, if a computer user entered the trademarked terms into Google’s Internet search engine, Google listed Axiom’s website as the second most relevant search result.
The district court issued a preliminary injunction in favor of NAM and Adagen, prohibiting Axiom from using NAM’s trademarks within meta tags and prohibiting Axiom from making the challenged statements about the DRX 9000. Among other things, the district court specifically found that Axiom’s use of NAM’s trademarks created a likelihood of confusion, and the court also found that Axiom’s advertising statements are literally false and material to consumers’ purchasing decisions. Court Filing
Later, in another case (Standard Process, Inc. v. Banks):
However, today “modern search engines make little if any use of metatags.”
As more and more webmasters “manipulated their keyword metatags to provide suboptimal keyword associations, search engines progressively realized that keyword metatags were a poor indicator of relevancy.” Accordingly, search engines today primarily use algorithms that rank a website by the number of other sites that link or point to it. Court Filing
Barry stated at Search Engine Land:
Although Standard Process won part of the case, the judge ruled that since the keyword META tags do not influence search results, having trademarked terms in them are immaterial. US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter
Tamar at Search Engine Roundtable points out:
META keywords are not discussed in this META Keywords Don’t Matter According to US Court
So, the real question is whether search engines still use the keyword META tag in ranking web pages in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google references META tags in their help document and excluded keywords from the list of tags that Google uses, “Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.” It does not explicitly cite the keywords META tag as being either important or irrelevant. Yahoo and MSN do not directly refer to the META keywords tag, to my knowledge, but many argue that they may still use the keywords data to rank web pages.
I have heard from other professional SEOs that the biggest value for META keywords is for your competition.
Stepping outside of the potential legal concerns for using trademarked content, I feel that the keywords tag still has relevance in website design and the SEO process. They may give competitors insight into your intentions, but if it may potentially help you rank well for a given query then why wouldn’t you use them? Even though both of these cases only reference Google, however, even if the courts don’t recognize the other engines, that doesn’t mean that you should!
What are your thoughts?
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