Eric Goldman, Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law and Director of the school’s High Tech Law Institute, has a post on a recent American decision involving search engine optimization and meta tags.

The tech/geek types will be scratching their heads now, because they know that meta tags don’t matter that much any more (title and description tags work better).

The court awarded $426,487 in damages, costs and fees to the plaintiff when the defendant used its copyrighted name in an alleged attempt to steal web traffic and customers from them.

Goldman makes two important points:

1) Don’t put third party trademarks in keyword metatags. It’s just not worth it. The marketing payoff is trivial at best, and too many courts are overreacting to the presence of metatags. Here, it cost the defendant 3+ years of profits for their entire business plus another nearly $200k for some SEO tactics that had little chance of helping anyway. That’s a bad business call.

2) If you are defending a lawsuit involving metatags or other technology-mediated uses of trademarks like keyword advertising, you MUST hire an attorney who already understands search engine technologies. As a good acid test, ask your attorney if they know how search engines index keyword metatags. If they don’t know that keyword metatags are irrelevant technologically, drop them immediately. The point is that your attorney will need to explain to the judge why keyword metatags don’t matter from a technological standpoint (like the attorneys apparently did in this case), and if your attorney doesn’t understand the technology, the judge won’t either.