Are Keywords and site descriptions copyrighted?

[btahead]

I am looking to copy the keywords and descriptions that the leaders use in my field. Is this legal?

Thanks

[monkeythumpa]

I would say it is illegal to copy, but who cares? Stealing other people's keywords whether legal or not is bad for these reasons:

1. If the "industry leader" knows about SEO, then they choose their keywords very carefully based on the title of the page, keywords on the page, search query volumes, and some voodoo thrown in for good measure. That is how I do it. You can copy their keywords, but if you don't have the same titles, content and queries, it is probably less effective than figuring it out and customizing for your website.

2. If the "industry leader" does not know about SEO, then you are copying crappy keywords, and it is worth less than if you had a two minute brainstorm.

Try to populate the meta tags with dynamic data avalable to you. If you can pull the category that your content goes in and them prepend it with some more targeted keywords for your page, that makes a nice keyword group. I use the title of the article to populate my description. Don't have two pages with the same description or you are diluting the SE strength of those two pages.

[rogerd]

It is unlikely that the industry leaders got their position because of effective keywords and descriptions. These are among the least potent variables.

But... it's an interesting question. I haven't seen a case, but maybe someone here will come up with a legal precedent. In the absence of such precedent, one wonders whether these tags are more like a title (generally not copyrightable) or page content (copyrightable). Or are they more like programming code (copyrightable if unique)?

Including trademarks that you don't own in your meta tags could be problematic, by the way - if the trademark holder actually found them, if they didn't like your site, and if they were motivated to do something. .

Rather than worrying about the legal issues, I'd change the keywords and descriptions to suit your pages and not worry about their minimal SEO impact.

[nancyb]

Checking out the keywords used by leaders in your field is a good idea but copying them from their meta tags is, as rogerd and monkeythumpa already said, pretty useless.

Instead of copying, which can bring up the hackles in this group, do some research to see if some of these keywords would also work with your content and then build you page around them.

Using another site's description, again as already said, is useless as far as getting a top rank. Another reason to avoid copying a description is because it could bring unwanted attention from the site you copied from. It is best not to cause yourself unwanted grief - in any form.

[BigDave]

If you are talking about the keywords and description meta tags, the description is probably coyright protected if it is much over one sentence in length. The keywords are just a bunch of comma separated words that would almost certainly not enjoy any copyright protection.

You do realize that meta keywords are ignored by most search engines, don't you? And the few that look at them don't give them very much weight.

It is much better to look at what is done by other sites, and learn from them, rather than just copying and not learning.