Meta Tags and Customer Confusion
Improper use of someone else's trademark in your meta tags can land you in legal hot water.
A meta tag is an HTML (hypertext markup language) code embedded on a Web page that is used by the website owner to identify the site content. Meta tags are powerful tools because they have a direct effect on the frequency with which many search engines will find a website.
Meta tags have been the subject of trademark lawsuits, because companies have used them to divert or confuse consumers. For example, Company A inserts the trademark name of a rival business, Company B, into its meta tag. A customer using a search engine to find Company B is diverted to Company A instead.
The deceptive use of another company's trademark in this way can result in a successful trademark infringement lawsuit, leading to an award of financial damages and, in some cases, attorney fees. But there are some instances when the use of another company's trademark is permitted in a meta tag. (See "Permissible Uses of Trademarks in Meta Tags", below.)
How Meta Tags Work
Meta tags do not affect the appearance of a website and are not visible when you look at a Web page, but they provide information regarding the content of the site. For example, the keyword meta tag for a website offering handmade watches and related items may appear as follows:
And the description meta tag (which also appears in many search engines' results pages) may look like:
Meta tags are used primarily by search engines that wade through the HTML code and text of each page. When a search engine finds a search term in a meta tag, it indexes the Web page for display in its search results. Over the past few years, because websites manipulated their keywords so much, keyword meta tags decreased in importance in search algorithms. In fact, Google ignores keyword meta tags altogether, although it still relies somewhat on description meta tags.
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