Jenzabar “expert witness” claims that Google still uses keyword meta tags

Proving that if you pay so-called expert witnesses enough money you can get them to say just about anything, Jenzabar has found a computer expert named Frank Farance who has submitted sworn testimony that Google really does take keyword meta tags into account in search rankings.  He ignores Google’s own statement on this issue  (without saying why).  Rather than setting forth a detailed discussion of his affidavit, I have posted it here for review.

As discussed in previous posts (here and here), Jenzabar is a higher education software company that is trying to bankrupt a documentary film company for the crime of having reported some controversial words stated by Jenzabar founder, Ling Chai, who was a student leader at Tiananmen Square (that she was allegedly hoping for bloodshed so that the Chinese people would open their eyes).  Rather than suing over the film itself, Jenzabar seized on a handful of pages on the Long Bow web site about the film that discussed Chai’s subsequent career as founder of Jenzabar and claimed that the use of the term “Jenzabar” in the keyword meta tags for some of those pages infringed Jenzabar’s trademark.

Comments

[spam name]

Rather than suing over the film itself, Jenzabar seized on a handful of pages on the Long Bow web site about the film that discussed Chai’s subsequent career as founder of Jenzabar and claimed that the use of the term “Jenzabar” in the keyword meta tags for some of those pages infringed Jenzabar’s trademark.

[Matt Cutts]

Oh, and noted search industry expert Danny Sullivan verified that the keywords meta tag did not affect Google's search results ranking as far back as 2007: http://searchengineland.com/meta-keywords-tag-101-how-to-legally-hide-words-on-your-pages-for-search-engines-12099

It's easy for anyone to test this on their own. On the root page of your domain, simply create a "keywords" meta tag with a long gibberish word. After the page is crawled and indexed (which you can verify by looking at the cached version of the page in Google's results), just search for that long gibberish word. You'll notice that Google won't return that page if you only have the gibberish word in the keywords meta tag.

[Matt Cutts]

Google has stated on our official webmaster blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html that we do not use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. I know because I helped write that post. :)