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Gefle/Sweden, 10/01/04
Moral aspects of keyword optimization: do we need to attract website visitors with "beheading" or "hurricane"?
In March blogger Tomas posted in his blog about TypeKey service for bloggers and titled the post "Beheading".
Now, some months further, his blog became in top 10 for keyword "Beheading" on some search engines and Tomas posted, that it does not feel comfortable to be in top 10 for beheading. When Traffic grows to his website, he always knows, that somebody far away suffered, and that's why people come from search engines to his blog looking for a 'beheading video'. The traffic datagram is really impressive: when somebody was killed by terrorists, his web site traffic grows, so it is really possible to see a beheading in Iraq in his traffic.
The phenomen of especially awful incidents attracting most public is not new in the news scene of classic media: CNN grew with people suffering in first Gulf war and classic TV primetime news show deadly family tragedies and car incidents, because it attracts visitors.
The same principle works in the world wide web: according to Google's Zeitgeist "Nick Berg" was the most popular query in May 2004, according to Overture's search term suggestion tool the most popular combined keywords for 'beheading' are 'beheading video' and 'nick berg beheading video', Lynndie England torture pictures were not less popular. Most popular search terms in Google in August were all combinations with hurricane keyword - taking the above behaviour as given - the assumption seems to be correct, that the majority of people looking for hurricanes in search engines were not looking to protect themselves against hurricanes, but for media material showing other people suffering the catastrophe.
While classic media have a codex not to directly show other people's death to make money, in the world wide web there is no such codex. Will the abscence of such a codex force SEO people to compete by having the most horrible keywords to attract the most visitors? Do bloggers need to write about Al Qaeda or Al Sarkawi terrorists, hurricanes, deadly wounded US soldiers in Iraq to be able to compete with classical news media? How could a codex for bloggers look like in world wide web? What punishment there might be if guerilla marketing tactics will break the rules?
I have no answer how to prevent this evolution, but I don't feel comfortable with this at all. Maybe it's just need to spam up the web with these keywords, so people looking for any such keywords wouldn't find the desired obscene media material anymore?
At the end one word to the readers of this article: of course you were not dropping in here, because you are voyeuristic. Nobody is. Your referer from the search engine proofs this. Just the query stats in search engines proof the opposite.
Link provided: http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/09/28/traffic
Added by: Marcel
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