The old saying “sex (or in this case nudity) sells” seems to be going mainstream for many web 2.0 sites.

Drivl.com for example, uses the word naked twice in its tagline “The naked truth. Written by naked interns.” I’m sure they are ranking well for the term “naked interns”, although I can’t verify at this time since I’m blogging from work (yay for ScribeFire). Although they are not using any of those risqué terms in their meta tags they must be getting good traffic from having that term without optimization.

Then there is swimwatch.net – a blog about international swimming. Their tagline is “read it naked. that’s how we wrote it”. Again they are not optimizing for the “read it naked” term obviously but I’m sure they are benefiting somewhere or they would not be using those words.

And last but not least, as a prime example, there is Vanessa Fox’s blog vanessafoxnude.com – Heck, she even has the word nude as part of her URL and several instances of enticing terms related to being nude, just no pictures. She even had a post recently about how she got quadruple the traffic on a post because of people looking for a different Vanessa that is more famous (Highshool Musical) than her since a story broke about nude pictures of her that were circling the Internet, so Vanessa Fox is definitely capitalizing on the “sex sells” ideology.

But is it all just a ploy to drive traffic from an unrelated field that obviously has the potential to drive traffic even if it is not even closely related to what these blogs are about? I guess it is cheating the system a bit, but who can blame them for trying. So much for relevancy, it’s gone out the window. How ironic coming from a person who used to work for Google, whose algorithm is much tied to relevancy.

Maybe I should rename my blog Read it Nude and Weap…

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