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Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search te

Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term

leonidasv 6y ago
You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not. It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.
lostlogin 6y ago
> will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?
- EdwardDiego 6y ago
  Yeah, there's a lot of motels from the 70s in my city that start with the letter A, but the Aalton Motel presumably won that arms race.
duskwuff 6y ago
Apple has control over that, though! They could easily reject applications with overly generic names if that were a concern.
- asiachick 6y ago
  They already do don't they. Only Apple gets "Maps", "Mail", "Messages", etc...
Dylan16807 6y ago
Someone could manually set some keywords too. But if there's too much uncertainty then just don't do ads at all. The fallback shouldn't be ads for all search terms. Your post seems like a rebuttal to the idea of "just show the app they wanted", but that wasn't the request. The request was just to leave the search alone.

leonidasv 6y ago

You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not. It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.

im3w1l 6y ago
How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.

lostlogin 6y ago

> will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?

EdwardDiego 6y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of motels from the 70s in my city that start with the letter A, but the Aalton Motel presumably won that arms race.

duskwuff 6y ago

Apple has control over that, though! They could easily reject applications with overly generic names if that were a concern.

asiachick 6y ago
They already do don't they. Only Apple gets "Maps", "Mail", "Messages", etc...

Dylan16807 6y ago

Someone could manually set some keywords too. But if there's too much uncertainty then just don't do ads at all. The fallback shouldn't be ads for all search terms. Your post seems like a rebuttal to the idea of "just show the app they wanted", but that wasn't the request. The request was just to leave the search alone.