A provocative piece on Search Engine Journal incited some interesting comments about tension between marketing strategies and the interests of Internet users.

The author’s job is doing SEO for a company that sells eyewear, and one of his initiatives recently flatlined. One of his strategies was to create an account for his company on the Flickr (the Yahoo-owned photo hosting and sharing service) account for his company, and post pictures related to their business… movie stars wearing their products, pictures of the stuff they sell, etc. The idea was to create images with keyword rich titles that would show up in search engine results, and get people to the company’s website by linking to it in each Flickr picture description. In December 2008, the account got shut down for violating terms of service regarding commercial use.

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