One of the first examples of such activity on the Internet were the spate of disputes in early 1997 regarding hot linking between websites. A new weapon in the competition war for electronic commerce dollars is the use of technology to increase the chances of an Internet search engine registering a hit with a particular site through the use of meta-tags. This article looks at the process of drawing hits from search engines with meta-tags. In particular this article looks at recent legal actions that have arisen where the defendant has used a trade mark or concept associated with the plaintiff as a meta-tag to draw hits to the defendant's website. Under both models, websites compete for hits, subscriptions and sales.
Advertising revenue is generated through hits.
The value of marketing dollars spent is measured and assessed by the quality of hits. Finally, scale, value and significance of transactions, orders and sales on commercial websites are originally determined by hits. There are number of common search techniques for consumer's to find and therefore hit a particular website. A meta-tag is information bundled into the code beneath the content of a website document. This information is machine readable, specifically designed to be read only by search engines.