Russian news outlets report today on a judgment of Saint Petersburg court in a lawsuit against SEO specialists that employed the so-called “black hat” techniques to ensure high ranking for their customers’ websites with search engines. The techniques involved using meta tags that are not supposed to actually represent the site promoted.

The lawsuit was filed after one electronics manufacturer found out that a search query for the trademark registered by this company brings users to the website of a competing company. The reason was simple: search engine optimizers hired by the competitor used the name of the trademark as a meta tag for their client’s site.

In Russia it is forbidden to use a trademark owned by another company in a domain name and in other types of addressing. But since it is hard to determine that HTML code of a web page containing a meta tag used to direct a search engine to a site can be qualified as a type of addressing, the court ruled that the defendants were not guilty.

This lawsuit is unique for Russia since it is the first one against “bl