The article 11 Sexy Girls with Star Wars Tattoos that You Don’t Have the Right to Publish should be scaring marketers and content creators at least as much as algorithmic updates from Google like Penguin and Panda scare SEOs. Content marketing is a phenomenal tactic, but this type of thing has real potential to ruin the power of great content by spamming those who can help it spread.
In the late ’90’s and early 2000’s, a few bad apples in the SEO community spammed email addresses, blogs, forums and websites of all kinds with manipulative link schemes, forever poisoning the well of the web’s sentiment against our industry. If we look back 5 years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the same tragic course has ruined the potential of the vast majority of viral content and created a backlash against content marketers in general.
Saddest of all, I’ve got no ideas on how we stop this eventuality. Even if 99.5% of marketers follow a responsible, non-spam ethos, the 0.5% are more than enough to taint the ecosystem. Tragic.