Beware Of Meta Tags & Seo Copyrights
The developer of the meta data owns the copyright and in many states, when you hire a specialist under an “Work for Hire Agreement”, then you own the copyright by default.
On the contrary, states like California have it differently, meaning a developer of meta data cannot give you ownership rights to material created under Work-for-hire agreement until you purchase workers unemployment and compensation insurance for them, you may also have to withhold taxes from any of their payments.
Your advised to inquire from your state department of insurance about legal requirements for “Work-for-hire” agreements.
If you turn your site over to an SEO company and sign a contract giving them the rights, or they have all copyrights by default under the law, you could be in serious trouble.
Read and understand the fine print, VERY IMPORTANT!
It is fairly common in the SEO industry for a company who does your SEO to ask for copyrights to any and all meta data and other SEO work they do on your site.
These contracts usually require you to pay a monthly fee to continue using “their” meta data. If you terminate services, the company can strip all the meta data from your site that they created, edited, or even analyzed. Take these words seriously.
If you sign your Copyright away then the law sides with SEO firms.
There are at least several legal precedents where courts sided with SEO companies when copyrights were disputed. The law favors the idea that copyrights exists on material even when only a computer can read it, and therefore, if you give rights to your meta data to someone, they can take it off your site if you no longer wish to pay them a monthly rental fee.
I know of companies that paid thousands of dollars for (very bad) SEO work and thousands more for the monthly right to use the awful meta data created. When they canceled their monthly contracts, the SEO companies stripped their entire sites of all meta data. They even stripped tags they did not create because they analyzed and edited existing tags and therefore, had copyrights to that data, too.
Never Sign Away Your Copyrights to SEO Data
If at all possible, do not do business with anyone that insists on retaining copyrights to any and all meta data they create, edit, or analyze for you. If they retain or have this right assigned to them, they can legally bar you from using it and totally strip your site.
When you pay someone to optimize your site, including creating meta tags and data, you should not have to pay a monthly fee to continue using the very meta data you paid for.
The folly of Signing Copyrights to an SEO company
On most websites meta data can be seen by anyone. Want to be sure? Just right click your mouse while on this page and select view Page Source. There it is the secret meta data for this web page.
Meta data itself does not contain any trade secrets. It is a series of words and descriptions and other things that help your website perform.
Since meta data for your site should be unique, it is not really something you could use for another site. What really is there to protect? Only an SEO’s ability to extort monthly services fees from you.
Sammy Kirkland in website development, programming and design. If you’d like to know more about our services, please visit our ecommerce website design page and our wonderful e-commerce seo page.