First off, apologies for the lack of posts over the last week. I was out of the office so things got a bit stale. I’m playing a bit of catch-up on work, but hopefully the posts will settle back to their regular intervals now.

I’ve been digging through my feed reader today and finding a number of gems. The greatest in my option that I have run across so far is a post from Barry Schwartz titled US Court Learns SEO, Decides META Keywords Don’t Matter.

The post discusses the recent case Standard Process v. Banks which looked at trademark infringement as it related to SEO. In the process of deciding the outcome of the case, the court got up to date on SEO and decided that the use of META keyword tags was immaterial to the ranking of a particular webpage.

Barry’s post is based off the analysis from law professor Eric Goldman, which can be found here, which includes a quote that I love. It is:

Lawyers, on the other hand, have been living in a parallel fantasy universe where keyword metatags single-handedly divert unwaveringly brand-loyal customers to piratical competitors.

Gotta love that.

This brings up an interesting SEO tactic – don’t try to figure out SEO, let the courts do it for you.

Kidding.

Two more articles of SEO interest for you to peruse over the weekend:

Diagnosing The SEO Health of Your Website by Jill Whalen
Link Development Tool Shortcuts for Firefox by Rae Hoffman