Metatags.

I commend the opinion issued in March by the Bar's Standing Committee on Advertising regarding the clarification of prohibitions against the deceptive use of metatags and hidden text by Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) on lawyer and law firm websites. The impact of the opinion, however, will be quite minimal. It's the equivalent of ancient Rome forcing every citizen to attend events at their coliseums. In other words, no one practices these SEO tactics anymore anyway.

The use of hidden text on a website, whether by disguising the text to blend in with a background, or making the font point so small that it's virtually invisible, is a tactic that was once, circa 1999, in practice by "black hat," or unethical SEOs, but swiftly recognized and punished by the major search engines. As the years went on, some SEOs came up with even more clever ways to insert descriptive text into their pages to game the algorithms (using Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets and off-screen text, or hidden text behind images), only to see their rankings pummeled by Google, or banned altogether, when the algorithm inevitably discoverd the text on a website.

In an ironic boost of credibility to this "insider" testament, on the very day the committee released their opinion, March 5, 2013, Google was awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office United States Patent #8,392,823 entitled "Systems and methods for detecting hidden texts and hidden links." Authored in part by Matt Cutts...

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