TwisterMc blog on a stick Subscribe creations skills faq categories connect daddy blog

How does Google crawl the iTunes Store?

Last I checked, a web page had to be on the web in order for Google to crawl the page and serve it up in search results.  But then how does it crawl iTunes?

On a recent search for “implus iphone application” I came across the iTunes store page ranked at #8 in Google.

Yes, the iTunes Store may be built on WebKit, or some sort of web application on the back end, but how exactly does Google get there?  Does the Googlebot run iTunes?  Ohh there is a possibility.

I checked the cache version of the page and it’s just text on a basic white background.  Looking at the source of the cache it appears that’s it’s an XML document.  Apple is feeding Google XML documents for iTunes products!

Now that’s pretty smart.  Not sure if it’s really fair as you can’t get to the page without iTunes, but it not only helps Apple but all the products in the iTunes store as well.

Apple iTunes


Posted Friday, September 5th, 2008
Categories: Apple, General, SEO, Software
Tags: , ,


2 Responses to “How does Google crawl the iTunes Store?”

  1. Al says:

    The iTunes store does *not* use WebKit, or HTML.

  2. Vani says:

    I guess Google doesn’t do crawling to get the itunes. In fact it uses the RSS feeds provided by Apple

Leave Your Comments