Metatags meaning

This Practice Note sets out how intellectual property and related rights, together with data protection duties, operate in the setting of web crawling, indexing, caching and scraping, viewed from a website operator’s standpoint. An explanation of the terminology The principal concepts of crawling, indexing, caching and scraping are outlined below. Crawling Web crawling is the activity whereby automated programmes (often called ‘bots’, ‘spiders’ or simply ‘web crawlers’) are deployed to traverse and read information across the web. One well-known crawler is Googlebot, which Google uses to copy web pages onto its servers; Google then indexes them (see the section on Indexing) to support searching of the internet. Website operators often provide ‘sitemaps’ (an XML file listing all pages on a site) to assist and enhance search engines’ crawling. Crawlers can also be put to other uses such as ‘scraping’ (see the section on ‘Scraping’) or collecting email addresses to send unsolicited emails (i.e. spamming). In addition to search engines, web crawling...

Using metatags and keyword advertising is lawful, yet it has prompted disputes where site operators select competitors’ trade marks as keywords to channel traffic to their own pages. The competitor’s trade mark is usually not visible in the advert or on the advertiser’s site, but the advert or the web link appears when an internet user enters the competitor’s mark as a search term. The central issue is whether employing third-party trade marks in metatags or keyword advertising amounts to infringement. Terminology ‘Metatags’ are keywords and descriptions inserted in the invisible hypertext mark-up language (html) of websites. They indicate a site’s content. When an internet user types a keyword or description into a search engine, it searches the metatags as well as the visible text on websites to present a list of the most relevant sites (the ‘natural’ results). Website owners use metatags to improve the chances of search engines listing and ranking their site higher, leading to more users visiting the site...