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My competitor's name in the title, meta descript, in H1 etc, (with the word versus in it, of course) and have this as a Software FAQ showing the benefits of my dedicated weasel hunting software versus their generalized rodent hunting software.
Could they sue me? (especially if I start showing up in serps for their name search?)
Anyone can sue you for anything, but if you put something up that could cause a company damage you are asking for trouble. People have been sued for posting remarks in forums already.
The question should be, why do it? If you need that to sell your product then you might want to find another type of business. You product should sell it's benifits.
No legal advise intended, just my opinion.
There are a lot of product comparison pages on the web also.
Just do a search for "product comparisons".
If the web page is actually a side-by-side comparison, then there is nothing wrong with it.
Title, Metas, whatever..
Just make sure that you properly publish reference to anything Trademarked,
<added>
Researching this, it can swing either way. Check this out for more info:
Meta Tags and Customer Confusion [nolo.com]
I think if the meta tags fairly represent the content of the page, it would be difficult for a competitor to claim some kind of trademark violation. (In the good old days, when meta-keywords actually did something, it was pretty common to see a firm's home page keywords stuffed with competitor names & brands. These words appeared ONLY in the hidden tags. This would certainly be looked on unfavorably by a judge, but wouldn't do any good now anyway.)
Naturally, you should be scrupulous in giving appropriate credit for trademarks, etc.
martinibuster, one C&D could force an otherwise perfectly acceptable page to have to come down altogether. I'd personally keep the company's name out of the metas and just use appropriate <h> tags and some link text going to a page with safe, bona-fide comparison data.
Then have the entire page be a legitimate side by side comparison (which was my intention all along), then it seeeeeeeems to me to be okay.
Your product should sell it's benefits.
When people type in the competitors name (who incidentally optimizes for "weasel hunting software"), well, my company's name pops up too, and the surfer can then discover the wonderful benefits of a dedicated weasel destroying solution.
That's the reason for the side by side, because the competitor is actually optimizing to compete with me, even though it's a generalized software that's not as good my weasel hunting solution.
Is there anything wrong with that?
One thing to consider:
How protective is the competitor of their mark? I could envision an argument where a company files suit for use of their mark in even the <title></title> tags, because it is widely known to be used to rank sites in search engines.
You could argue that they could just as easily sue for use of a mark in the body of a page, but I think the title in the header, so close to the meta's could attract this sort of legal attention.
Just a thought.
Also you must be careful about specifications of competitors. They need to be dated, otherwise they can change the spec or lower the price and get lawyers and witnesses to record your false advertising. If you date the information though, customers will be very wary if that date falls back more than a month or two.
Directive 97/55/EC of European Parliament and of the Council of 6 October 1997 amending Directive 84/450/EEC concerning misleading advertising so as to include comparative advertising [europa.eu.int] clearly states that "Comparative advertising shall, as far as the comparison is concerned, be permitted" if it is done in a fair manner.
In Germany this directive was implemented in September 2000 by changing sections 2 and 3 of the Unfair Competition Law (Gesetz gegen unlauteren Wettbewerb; see: Plaß, NJW 2000, 3161).
Andreas
