“Black” Search Engine Optimizers Acquitted by a Russian Court

Russian news outlets report today on a judgment of Saint Petersburg court in a lawsuit against SEO specialists that employed the so-called “black hat” techniques to ensure high ranking for their customers’ websites with search engines. The techniques involved using meta tags that are not supposed to actually represent the site promoted.

The lawsuit was filed after one electronics manufacturer found out that a search query for the trademark registered by this company brings users to the website of a competing company. The reason was simple: search engine optimizers hired by the competitor used the name of the trademark as a meta tag for their client’s site.

In Russia it is forbidden to use a trademark owned by another company in a domain name and in other types of addressing. But since it is hard to determine that HTML code of a web page containing a meta tag used to direct a search engine to a site can be qualified as a type of addressing, the court ruled that the defendants were not guilty.

This lawsuit is unique for Russia since it is the first one against “black” SEO which is actually a huge industry in the country. And unless the legislation is clarified to better reflect cases of trademark violation when using them in websites, new lawsuits will be sure to follow.

But since some of the Russian search engines (including Rambler, the one that appeared in this lawsuit) are told by many internet experts to be vulnerable to all types of questionable SEO methods, I don’t think lawsuits will stop SEO professionals from making substantial revenue off optimizing corporate websites of their customers using all the techniques that will ensure good results.

Via (in Russian)

Photo by pittaya used under Creative Commons