Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I have a particularly interesting, if not distressing, situation/question. We are using cloaking to send traffic to a client's site and when the original "spider content" was created, there were links to several competitors' sites therein.
Now, because Google draws text from the page, a search for our client's competitor (perhaps more than one) results in our client showing up in the search results. What's worse is that the name of their competitor is IN the description that Google so wisely attributed to that page. Needless to say, the competitor is up in arms about this and threatening legal action.
What's worse is that the competitor is referring to the cached version of the page as being a violation...ignoring the fact that Google has taken that content from us and placed it on their servers, so what they're looking at and referring to isn't even on our servers.
Does anyone know of the legal ramifications of this, or has anyone read any articles that relates to this?
Anyone have any thoughts?
~Canton
We've decided to leave it alone until someone complains and then remove it immediately if that happens.
Re Cache situation, I suggest using the <noarchive> tag.
Sure, it raises a flag that you're cloaking, but if someone is referring to the cache as a violation, this would seem to be the lesser of 2 evils.
From a legal perspective, I don't think you have a right to mention your competitor's name in any of your marketing material if it can be viewed publically even if this is not your intent. (I've no legal qualifications btw!)
Use <noarchive>, & fingers crossed that will keep everyone happy.
J
Thanks for the reply and information. I've considered the noarchive/nocache tag in the past, but made the conscious decision not to use it.
I think I may change my approach now...
Thanks again,
~Canton
