I’m being redundant, right? Many of my lawyer friends would say that a lot of today’s lawsuits would fall under this category, but I thought this particular one was very interesting. Apparently a law firm wanted to stop another site from linking to it if the link name was anything other than the law firm’s domain name or company name. In other words, if I were to draw a parallel to Intechnic’s site, it would essentially be the difference between this “Intechnic Corporation” and “Web Development Services”, the latter of which, is what they did not want.
To me, it does and does not make sense at the same time. The site linking to them (as far as I can tell) was not, in any way, malicious. They linked because they found the information useful, the same way I would link to, for example, Enterprise 2.0 Solutions, if I had a site that talked about that topic. In this scenario, both I (the site owner) and Intechnic (the owner of the page I linked to) win because I get a link with useful information, while Intechnic gets a referring link that helps search engine optimization.
Going back to what I presume was the rationale behind the law firm’s actions. They may have been afraid of something called a “google bomb”. Because of the way search engine optimization works, if I link to a page with a particular keyword (see my web development services link above), google will display that page in its results when someone searches for that set of keywords. Now imagine if I were to have one thousand sites link to a page using the words “there is no place like home”. Well, that site could be about how to properly inflate car tires, but since so many people link to it via that set of keywords, it would end up showing up under the search results for “there is no place like home”…along with Kansas, The Wizard of OZ, Dorothy, and the evil witch. Now imagine someone doing the same thing but with words that you wouldn’t want your business associated with…
In any case, I think they over-reacted, but that’s just my opinion.
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