Corporations cannot directly pay google to elevate the relevancy of their pages/site in regular search results, although they can certainly buy google adwords(which can be expensive depending on the words bought) that appear in the "Sponsored Links".

Also, RH was upset not only about the images/linkage, but also the embedded meta tags as mentioned in the love letter from the lawyers. Meta tags are intended to give a relevancy summary to those who bother to read them, typically web spiders. RH could certainly take issue if someone was telling spiderbots that RH is the focus of their pages/site. As a sidenote, meta tags generally are not what they used to be in terms of building relevancy, but could be an academic point of contention to use in growling at someone.



"Benjamin J. Weiss" <benjamin@birdvet.org>
Sent by: centos-bounces@caosity.org

02/14/2005 06:59 AM
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        cc:        
        Subject:        Re: [Centos] Red Hat Legal Targets www.centos.org website content



Paul wrote:
>On Sun, 2005-02-13 at 20:46 -0700, Greg Knaddison wrote:
>
>
>>On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 02:06:30 -0800, Francois Caen <frcaen@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 03:33:24 -0500, Forrest Samuels
>>><forrest@liquidcs.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Does this also mean you can't link to the location where you get the source
>>>>to build CentOS? Can you still link to Red Hat's Errata pages?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>The answer to that is in the letter:
>>>
>>>"Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our
>>>client's web site without permission. "
>>>
>>>Which is ludicrous.
>>>
>>>And would have a funny side effect: if nobody linked to RH, they would
>>>disappear from Google  :)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I imagine that RedHat has given permission to the search engines and
>>media and...everyone who they feel helps them by linking.
>>
>>Though I agree, it is counter to the way that the web has grown.
>>
>>
>
>Actually since Google works based on the number of sites linking to you
>it would effect their ratings.
>
>
>
Not necessarily.  The large corporations pay the search engines to
ensure that they come up higher on the response lists.
I understand that RedHat is trying to protect their income.  After all,
why pay for RHEL if CentOS is free?  I basically have two questions that
I need to find a good IP attorney to clarify for me:
1) If CentOS is, in fact, a re-compile clone of RHEL with RH's
permission (as per the GPL), then how can they legally require that
CentOS not disclose that fact?
2) Is it legal to restrict others from linking to your website?
I think RH's going a bit overboard, as there really was no confusion as
to whether or not RH was supporting CentOS.
Ben
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