Yes, Google Says It's Having Problems Listing iTunes Preview Pages
Yes, it is harder to find pages to iTunes apps in Google. But no, the company says, it's not part of some nefarious plot. Rather, Google's having technical problems gathering iTunes Preview pages, an issue it's working to solve.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has confirmed what SEO watchers spotted over the past few days: iTunes Preview pages are dropping out of or losing rank in its results, and the pickup was unusually wide — TechCrunch, CNET, the Guardian, MacRumors and others all ran versions on or about April 2, 2013. The company says it is a technical problem gathering those pages, not policy, and explicitly denies any deliberate move against Apple.
The denial matters because Google arrives at this moment with a trust deficit. Its own "How Search Works" infographic from March 2013 had just framed ranking as principled engineering, while the Google Shopping overhaul drew criticism for pushing commercial results behind paid listings. There is also history here: back in 2005, Techdirt questioned whether Google's music-search behavior around iTunes content was even lawful, and a similar episode of mysterious indexing failures across big and small sites hit in October 2010.
First-order effects
- App developers and publishers who relied on organic traffic to iTunes Preview pages lose a discovery channel overnight, since those pages were a common landing point from web searches for iOS apps.
- Apple gets a free-rider problem in reverse: its App Store marketing pages now depend on a rival's crawler working correctly, with no contractual guarantee of when — or whether — Google restores full coverage.
Second-order effects
- Every large site that sees its pages vanish can now cite the iTunes case when pressing Google for faster fixes and clearer communication, raising the cost of opaque indexing changes across the board.
- The episode hands ammunition to critics already arguing Google favors its own properties, keeping regulatory and press attention fixed on how commercial rankings are produced rather than just what they return.
Third-order effects
- If app-centric pages sit awkwardly in a crawler built for the open web, the structural pressure is toward Google building dedicated app-indexing machinery — an acknowledgment that the link graph no longer covers where users actually end up.
- Search neutrality disputes shift from 'did Google rig this?' toward 'who audits the infrastructure?', pushing for external verification of claims that outages are technical rather than strategic.
The trend: As discovery migrates into apps, Google's web index increasingly strains against content it does not fully control, forcing the company to prove that gaps are bugs rather than business decisions.