Metta World Peace? That’s so Meta
Internet Marketing
Another day, another athlete name change.
Put this one in the absurdity column right next to Chad Johnson of the Cincinnati Bengals changing his name to Ocho Cinco.
Today, it’s Los Angeles Laker’s NBA Player Ron Artest, who is changing his name to Metta World Peace.
Seems about right for LA.
Anyway, Metta is loving-kindness, friendliness, benevolence, amity, friendship, good will, kindness, love, sympathy, close mental union (on same mental wavelength), and active interest in others.
It’s a good stab at reputation management from one of the least loving, friendly, benevolent, sympathetic and selfish players in the NBA; a guy most famous for his technical fouls, on-court brawls and off-court brawls.
We’re not suggesting he can’t change. People can change. It’s not easy, and we’re not buying that Artest necessarily has pulled off the change, but either way, a name change does not equate to an actual change.
We’ve equated it with trying to trick Google by changing meta tags to make your content seem like something it’s not.
Meta tags are hidden pieces of information inside the HTML of your site. Humans don’t see them. Instead, they’re for machines like search engine bots. The tags try to tell the search engines what the content is about. In the early days of search, it was easy to use Meta tags to trick the bots. You could write a piece of content about laying in bed but give it meta tags that would trick Google into thinking it was a piece of content about plastic surgery, for example. This would, falsely, help you rank for that keyphrase on your site.
Search bots have evolved tremendously since those early days and there is not a lot of debate on whether they even look at the meta tags to determine search ranking.
For the same reason, we hope we look at Artest’s behavior and not his name to determine what he’s about, we are glad that bots dig deeper and use the actual content to determine what the content is about and not some human-applied label.
The take away from this exercise in name changing is simple.
Just like you can’t fool people to overlook a reputation established from a history of bad behavior with a cosmetic name change, you can’t fool Google by trying to tell it your content is something it’s not.
You have to work hard, make the commitment and produce great content that will make Google change its opinion of your content.
About Cody Swann
Cody Swann is an entrepreneur, developer, strategist, banged up ex-football walk-on, retired body builder and former journalist born and raised in South Florida. He currently splits his time between his hometown of Stuart, FL and Los Angeles, CA. Cody founded Gunner Technology, a highly sought after digital agency, specializing in helping companies maximize profits through custom web development, technology efficiencies, social media strategy and search engine marketing.
As a manager and developer at ESPN for nearly six years, Cody led development and vision for two of ESPN’s most popular online features: Sports Scoreboards and GameCasts. Additionally Cody oversaw all aspects of MyESPN and ESPN’s social network, ESPN Fan Profiles. Cody worked with Technology, Editorial, Sales, Marketing and relevant business stakeholders to mold ESPN’s social media strategy, develop custom applications for it and execute it. Under his direction, ESPN successfully ported large portions of its core product from a proprietary Java stack to an open source Ruby on Rails stack, capable of standing up and performing under the tremendous load world's most popular sports site delivers.
Cody began forging his technological knowledge more than 10 years ago, developing and designing websites in college. His development work has included web development, web design, content writing, digital photography and digital video production for award-winning sites like Gainesville.com, GatorSports.com and ESPN.com. He has helped set digital strategy and direction for companies in the New York Times Regional Newspaper group, ESPN, ABC and Disney.
He is a recognized expert in web development, social media strategy, search engine optimization, conversion optimization, analytics tracking and business planning. He has worked with large interactive media companies to small and medium sized businesses. Cody motivates and inspires creative teams to deliver superb, polished work under tight deadlines.