Some of you may know that I love Flickr. I have about 1800 pictures up there. Recently, I posted some pictures of Barb’s family watching a video on YouTube, and tagged it “youtube”, among other things. It currently has 107 views, up from the normal 5-10 views on most of my pictures.
That got me thinking. Is it “ethical” to drive traffic to your website by adding tags and search terms that don’t really apply? The “youtube” tag was relevant to the picture, but I could have tagged it with all sorts of popular tags that don’t really apply. Similarly, I could tag this blog post with “sex” or “hate Republicans” or whatever the kids are searching for these days, and drive more traffic.
Or, alternatively to adding tags that don’t really fit, what if I actually wrote about stuff based on current top Google searches? It wouldn’t be hard to find out what the week’s popular search terms are, and then I could write about those things.
Usually, I post about whatever I feel like posting about. Sometimes that’s current events. For example, I got some random traffic when I posted about Zidane’s head butt, and I got random traffic when I posted about the Enviga tea that some marketing guy sent me. But often it’s not, like when I post about my stupid cat.
Anyway, I have no point, here. I’m just wondering where the line is between offering content that people might find interesting and then trying to promote it, and prostituting one’s self for traffic.