8:48PM
Apple's Cheating Metadata
It seems as if someone at Apple has been playing around with their keywords/metadata, as I found out when I was trying to download a QuickTime movie off their site. As you can see several players in the phone industry are listed and some companies that are not in it at all are included. Here you can see Microsoft, Blackberry, Google, Gmail, and Google Video, Maps, Pictures, etc. are included. This seems like a bit of a sleazy SEO trick to me but, hey, it's your call.
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Matthew Keating Jul 1, 2010 at 8:48 PM
Matthew Keating Jul 1, 2010 at 8:48 PM
Reader Comments (5)
I don't understand. What is SEO and what is this actually about?? Please reply.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically affects wehre your website shows up on search engine results. The better your SEO, the higher up you are on the list of search results. Generally when you set up meta keywords (shown in the image) you post keywords relevant to your product or service. Apple is apparently using words totally irrelevant to themselves thus improving their ranking on search results when people search for these popular companies. This is generally bad overall practice.
Apple isn't stupid, they will have dedicated SEO experts working on their site, so I doubt that this is a silly under-hand tricks, and I assume there is good reason for the use of such keywords - accounting for searches such as "Which is better Microsoft Zune, or iPod?" and so fourth. And it's not like they have crammed it full of "free, sex, porn, cool" - at least it is still related to the tech industry.
This isn't technically "cheating", as there are topics relating to Microsoft, and all those other keywords on Apple's website. I would look at it as cheating if it said "free, sex, porn, cool", however.
A response to the last 2 comments. Some if your points are true. However, I would lisle you to keep in my mind that this was on the iPhone 4 Page and not Apple.com Therefore, Microsoft in No way whatsoever has any relationship to the iPhone 4 and neither does gmail, Blackberry, or even WINDOWS! As they were keywords. If Apple were to put Microsoft on any page or any thing closemto the word Windows it would probably be under the System requirements page of iTunes.