The meta tag mystery

It was with surprise that one of ITWeb`s journalists, searching the Internet for comment on a particular topic, found an ICT World article masquerading as one of our own on Google.

Unable to understand why the ICT World article popped up, the journo viewed the source code for the page, and revealed the following:

<META NAME="description" content="itweb.co.za: Technology News Site, the IT professional`s most valuable resource on the Web.">

Then he opened ITWeb`s site, and brought up the following meta tag:

<meta NAME="description" content="itweb.co.za: Technology News Site , the IT professional`s most valuable resource on the Web.">

Identical! Even down to the slogan.

Ultimately, this didn`t do us any real damage and the tag was gone, so we decided to let the issue rest.

Georgina Guedes, Journalist, ITWeb

For those of you who don`t know, meta tags are the HTML coding that search engines use to understand documents on the Internet and link them to users` search queries. So, in this instance, people searching for "ITWeb" articles on "the Convergence Bill" would find themselves directed to ICT World`s articles on the same topic.

Fortunately, Google uses its PageRank technology as well as other sophisticated text-matching technologies to find pages for its users. PageRank takes into account the number of times that a page has been linked to by other pages, making ITWeb`s ranking very high.

We phoned Internet lawyer Ryk Meiring and asked him for his take on the matter.

"The first thing to do in a case like this would be to institute action on a trademark basis," he said. "Then, determine whether it was done with the knowledge of management and the board of directors and if it was used in commerce."

Although there have been no local court cases, Meiring asserted that South African courts interpret trademark laws in much the same way as European and American courts do, and those two areas have both seen convictions.

Numerous phone calls to various people at ICT World`s parent company Johnnic established that few were aware of, or could understand the issue. Once we managed to get hold of a techie, the meta tag vanished quickly.

Johnnic responded with: "We have investigated the matter thoroughly and have confirmed that the meta tags from your Web site and our Web site are identical. We have immediately taken steps to rectify this and as you can see, by going into our Web site, that it has been altered."

Various conversations with people at ICT World led us to believe that the meta tag incident was the work of a techie who had subsequently left the company.

Ultimately, this didn`t do us any real damage and the tag was gone, so we decided to let the issue rest. The valuable lesson from all this is that the management of any company has the obligation to know what`s going on in the company, right down to levels of technicality that might not be understood.