I just came across something that really bothered me, thought I would blog about it. Everyone who has a site or a blog knows that traffic is important. There are many ways to attract traffic to your site, the big one and the the buzz word you probably hear a lot about is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It basically gets your site higher up on search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Without getting into the debate about the legitimacy of these methods, I think we can all agree on one thing, misleading your readers to gain traffic is not a legitimate method. OK, now that we agree on that, let me tell you what happened. A lot of the people I am following on Twitter all of a sudden posted the following message: “Wal-Mart Sells Apple iPhone, $99 Models Available – InformationWeek http://tinyurl.com/9yh5jd“. The posted link was to this article, the title being “Walmart sells Apple iPhone, $99 model available“.

When I saw these messages on Twitter, I assumed that someone was misinformed, but was then surprised to find out that the author of the article was the one doing the misleading. The title is simply not true. Walmart is NOT selling $99 iPhones. OK, it does not explicitly say Walmart is selling them, but it is extremely implied, and that in my opinion, is not the way to do things. First of all, I just think it is ethically wrong to mislead someone, but more importantly, I know I will never go to that site again for any information.

FYI, what the article says is that Walmart is selling iPhones, and at the very end of the article there is one sentence about AT&T selling refurbished iPhones for $99, nothing to do with Walmart.

The readers will read the article, see that it was misleading, and lose trust in the source. So maybe the site will accomplish their immediate goal of increasing traffic, but long term, it just causes damage, to the reader, to the source, and to the integrity of the Web as a whole. Dontchya think?

-Hillel