Apple’s new iPhone hits SEO snag
The new third generation iPhone went on sale at the weekend, and while it proved to be an instant success with customers and critics alike, it seems that Apple might not have thought through the long-term SEO potential of the product - and has gone for a subtle yet drastically-sudden name change today.
Originally titled the “3G S”, the new iPhone is now known as the “3GS”. Apple hasn’t made any official comment on the change, but it’s plain to see on their website that it has happened.
What’s in a space character?
If the move is down to pure search engine motives, then perhaps Apple have made an unnecessarily knee-jerk decision as searches today for the old-style “3G S” are returning iPhone-dominated results on Google, Bing and Ask. (Only on Yahoo was the iPhone denied top-spot, perhaps understandably by the Three/3 mobile phone network official website.) Considering the millions of digital column inches that will be written about the 3GS in the coming months, the product will surely tighten its grip on the search term - space character or no space character.
Conversely, doing a search today for the new “3GS” name brings back a similarly iPhone-heavy set of results across the board, with some high-ranking references dating from several weeks ago, pre-empting Apple’s decision. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it wasn’t very clear that there was a space in the first place…
Either way, it’s interesting to see that maybe SEO can now impact on product launches of even the world’s most marketing-savvy companies.