SEO plays a role in Automattic’s counterclaim against WP Engine. The legal document mentions search engine optimization six times and SEO once as part of counterclaims asserting that WP Engine excessively used words like “WordPress” to rank in search engines as part of an “infringement” campaign that uses WordPress trademarks in commerce. A close look at those claims shows that some of the evidence may be biased and that claims about SEO rely on outdated information.
Automattic’s Claims About SEO
Automattic’s counterclaim asserts that WP Engine used SEO to rank for WordPress-related keywords and that this is causing confusion.
The counterclaim explains:
“WP Engine also has sown confusion in recent years by dramatically increasing the number of times Counterclaimants’ Marks appear on its websites. Starting in or around 2021, WP Engine began to sharply increase its use of the WordPress Marks, and starting in or around 2022, began to sharply increase its use of the WooCommerce Marks.”
Automattic next argues that the repetition of keywords on a web page is WP Engine’s SEO strategy. Here’s where their claims become controversial to those who know how search engines rank websites.
The counterclaim asserts:
“The increased number of appearances of the WordPress Marks on WP Engine’s website is particularly likely to cause confusion in the internet context.
On information and belief, internet search engines factor in the number of times a term appears in a website’s text in assessing the “relevance” of a website to the terms a user enters into the search engine when looking for websites.
WP Engine’s decision to increase the number of times the WordPress Marks appear on WP Engine’s website appears to be a conscious “search engine optimization” strategy to ensure that when internet users look for companies that offer services related to WordPress, they will be exposed to confusingly written and formatted links that take them to WP Engine’s sites rather than WordPress.org or WordPress.com.”
They call WP Engine’s strategy aggressive:
“WP Engine’s strategy included aggressive utilization of search engine optimization to use the WordPress and WooCommerce Marks extremely frequently and confuse consumers searching for authorized providers of WordPress and WooCommerce software;”
Is The Number Of Keywords Used A Ranking Factor?
I have twenty-five years of experience in search engine optimization and have a concomitantly deep understanding of how search engines rank content. The fact is that Automattic’s claim that search engines “factor in the number of times” a keyword is used in a website’s content is incorrect. Modern search engines don’t factor in the number of times a keyword appears on a web page as a ranking factor. Google’s algorithms use models like BERT to gain a semantic understanding of the meaning and intent of the keyword phrases used in search queries and content, resulting in the…
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