Sleight of Hand

Keeping up with all the hoopla regarding MVNOs, Portugal is now at the forefront of that burgeoning market, sporting a ratio of roughly one MVNO per mobile operator (whether or not MVNOs can be considered as such when wholly or partly owned by their parent operators or their conglomerates is something I leave to the legal eagles).

I've been holding on tightly to my regarding this sort of thing (and there is plenty of commentary on Portuguese sites regarding the current offerings), but I couldn't avoid pointing out their somewhat shady web tactics.

Doing a "view source" on Rede4, I found their meta tags to have a rather interesting choice of keywords:

<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="rede4; telemóvel; SMS; grátis; Nokia;
tarifários; toques; logos; minuto; barato; móvel; rede; uzo;" >

Makes sense, and their choice of keywords is rather restrained (I would even say "politically correct"), with only a single mention to their competitors.

Doing a "view source" on UZO, however, turned up a much more interesting choice of keywords:

<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="descomplicado,desbloqueado,grátis,desbloquear
telemoveis,gratis sms,imagens telemovel,motorola,nokia,sms,siemens,
telemoveis,telemovel, telemóvel, telemóveis,telemoveis desbloqueados,
telemoveis imagens,toques telemovel,tmn,vodafone,optimus,rede4,uzo,uso,use,uze" />

Besides naming nearly every mobile operator/brand (something I expect them to fix soon, since they left a few existing ones out), their specific mention of Rede4 before their own brand caught my eye - had it always been there?

I guess we'll never know, but you can surely form your own judgement on their tactics.