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SEO contest
Online Advertising
SEO contest
In SEO (search
engine optimization) contests, webmasters compete to rank best
on Google for a given (usually nonsense) keyword or keyword combination.
They have become an often important method for webmasters to promote
their web sites and gain web traffic. While the contestants compete for
prizes, fame or glory, the organising body often benefits as well.
History
The nigritude ultramarine competition by
SearchGuild is widely acclaimed as the mother of all SEO contests. It was
started on May 7, 2004 and was won two months later by Anil Dash.
On September 1 of the same year, webmasters were challenged to rank #1 on
Google in three
months time for the search phrase seraphim proudleduck.
In the first quarter of 2005, people were competing for the term loquine
glupe, spawning web sites ranging from shampoo advertising to
holiday resorts. The page that
won in the end looked rather boring, and used lots of questionable
techniques like
"keyword stuffing".
Internationally, in 2005 two major contests took place in Europe. In Germany
the Hommingberger Gepardenforelle by the computer magazine c't spawned almost 4
million results. The goal was to find out how search engines rank sites. In
Poland almost at same time the Polish SEO community organized the msnbetter
thangoogle contest. It topped the 4 million but failed to reach it's goal to
promote SEO in Poland and to get search engines companies attention for the
polish market. Currently at least one contest is taking place in France.
A competition ran from
January 1, 2006 to March 1, 2006 and carried the term redscowl bluesingsky,
another set of made-up words. It was sponsored by SEOLogs. Shoemoney won this contest, and since he donated the winner's
money, he donated it to the number 2 winner.
A contest that had been announced earlier - but only started on
January 15, 2006 - is the one by V7N SEO forum administrator John Scott and another search engine optimizer,
WebGuerrilla. In this particular contest, both competitions use the same
search phrase v7ndotcom elursrebmem, but each has its own set of special
rules.
The basics
All these contests appear to be based on a number of common factors:
- In simple words, a
SEO contest
invites webmasters to trick the search engines. Some webmasters resort to
spam, while others use white-hat optimization techniques (like providing
good content covering the competition, or optimizing page titles).
- While there are many
search engines around, they all seem to focus on Google in particular.
Google is known to be a difficult search engine to rank well on, especially
for new web sites.
- Most SEO contests expect people to optimize a single web page for a
non-existent phrase of two silly words. The main reason for this is to keep
existing web sites from getting a head start. But at the same time it makes
sure that regular internet searchers won't be bombarded with "spammy"
results when searching the web for "regular"
information.
- Blogs seem
to do well at these challenges, indicating in a way that pages with valuable
content are preferred by search engines over regular websites, especially
when it comes to newsworthy and fresh information of a temporary nature.
The differences
Certain special rules and limitations are invented to set contest apart from
the rest. Often, these limitations will make it harder to benefit from the
ranking algorithm - including quirks - of the targeted search engine. For
example, the January 2006 Redscowl Bluesingsky contest issued by
SEOLogs is open for new domains only. That means that the contestants
cannot benefit from the ranking advantage old web sites are thought to have over
new ones. An example of that is the age advantage
Anil Dash' blog page had over the well-received but brand new
Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ - respectively ended 1st and 6th in the Nigritude
Ultramarine challenge. Most likely, the Redscowl Bluesingsky game will be won by
a domain of the style
redscowl-bluesingsky.com which is bound to attract natural links, and
benefit from the fact that the
URL is made up
entirely of the search words.
Another special rule that fits well with the 'purpose' of SEO contests today
is the obligation to 'link back' to the organizing body - often a search engine
optimization blog or forum. Since a web document's ranking on major search
engines like Yahoo!, Google or MSN Search is mainly determined by internet
hyperlinks
pointing to that document, forcing webmasters to link to a web site is quite a
powerful way to increase its web presence... Good example are the contest
announced by V7N and its counterpart by WebGuerrilla. While the first of these
originally required the contestants to link to V7N forums, the second forbids
its players to do just that. Instead a special link to Google engineer
Matt Cutts' blog is imperative. Because of this rivalry, both the rules and
prize money on both these SEO contests were updated regularly up until the
official start date of January 15, 2006.
Notable Contests
Several contests have generated significant media attention online.
Nigritude ultramarine
- Dates: May 7, 2004 - July 7, 2004
- Keyword: Nigritude ultramarine
- Prize: iPod, Flat Panel LCD Screen & various bonus prizes
- Sponsor:
Dark Blue
Two prizes were awarded for the top position in a Google search: one for the
top position on 9am GMT on June 7, 2004, and a second prize awarded at the close
of the contest on 9am GMT July 7, 2004.
There were about two hundred competitors, who deployed an astonishing variety
of dirty tricks, from
Google
bombing upwards. The competitive conditions encouraged intensive, free use
of techniques that would have otherwise been used in a more conservative manner,
and it is entirely possible that some normally-legitimate SEOs took a dirty
approach for the occasion. Weblogs and wikis were hit by
the contest, and needed to be constantly policed to prevent "nigritude
ultramarine"
spam from lowering their
signal-to-noise ratio below acceptable limits. Public wiki sandboxes were
especially vulnerable.
On July 7, Six Apart Vice President and weblogger Anil Dash was announced as the contest winner. Dash stated that his goal in
entering the contest was to "prove that real content trumps all the shady
optimization tricks that someone can figure out". Instead of resorting to such
tactics, he simply wrote a weblog entry and asked his readers to link to it.
Another competitor took this idea further and wrote the Nigritude Ultramarine
FAQ[1],
which placed sixth overall, won the "Judge's Choice" award, and remains a
valuable source of information about the competition.
Afterlife
Since the end of the formal competition, the evolution of the
Google results for nigritude ultramarine remains an enlightening area
of study. As of
November 7, 2005, the top two
Google results are the blog entry that won the competition and the Nigritude
Ultramarine FAQ.
It is known that Google generally tries to detect and penalise dirty tricks,
and nigritude ultramarine makes an obvious test case. An important open
question remains whether Google has treated nigritude ultramarine
specially in any way; the notoriously secretive company has refused to comment.
As of September 2004,
the Google results do not appear hand-crafted, and several insipid pages appear
high—although lower than they did during the competition—on the search page.
Comparison of search results for nigritude ultramarine during and
after the competition is complicated by the change the competition has caused to
the meaning of the phrase. Before, it was purely a nonsense phrase that could
not possibly be searched for by anyone looking for any real resource. Now it
refers primarily to the competition itself, and is a natural phrase to use to
find information about the competition. (As of
September 5, 2004, the highest Google result that is an official competition
page is SearchGuild's, which is ranked 18th.) It is also natural for someone to
search for the phrase to find out why it appears on so many webpages. (The
Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ, ranked second as of September 5, 2004, is an
excellent resource for this.)
Furthermore, due to the nature of web searching, any web-based reporting
about the nigritude ultramarine competition, feeds back and affects the
search results in question. This effect was previously noticed in the reporting
of
Googlewhacks, and takes a more complex form in this case.
References: Nigritude Ultramarine
Seraphim proudleduck
- Dates:
1
September 2004 -
1 January 2005
- Keyword: seraphim proudleduck
- Prize:
£1000 (1st), £300 (2nd), £200 (3rd)
- Sponsor:
Salmonbones
Seraphim proudleduck was created by Salmonbones. When the contest ended, over
520,000 results existed for the term. (As of January 2006, about 132,000 results still exist.)
Since different Google servers are known to show different results, the
search was to be performed from the UK. A bonus prize (a webpage with a
PageRank of
7) was going to be awarded to the number one position for the phrase in
Google Images. However, in an unexpected turn of events, the contest
organizer announced that he sold the
SalmonBones.co.uk
domain
name, and no prize was actually awarded. (The contest winner,
Google Blogoscoped, wrote more about this on their website.)
V7ndotcom Elursrebmem
- Dates:
January 15, 2006 - May 15, 2006
- Keyword: V7ndotcom Elursrebmem
- Prize: $4,000 and an iPod for 1st place plus bonus prizes for 2nd
through 5th place
- Sponsor: v7n.com
The contest runs from
January 15, 2006 to May 15, 2006.[2]
The prizes are awarded for the top five positions in Google. A number of
webmasters in the Search industry have decided to give any winnings they have to
charity -- whether or not they will do remains to be seen.
On
January 18 the MSN search engine V7ndotcom elursrebmem returned zero
results for the phrase, but returned more than zero results for this phrase plus
other keywords. This was first uncovered by
Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped
[3]. What seemed like MSN blocking an SEO competition now looks like a
temporary glitch, as results are back to normal.
Serps
- Dates: January 16, 2004 - April 16, 2004
- Keyword: Serps
- Prize: none
- Sponsor: various
The competition originated in the
Usenet
newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines.
Serps was chosen
as the keyword for the initial competition, primarily due to the fact it is an
acronym for
Search Engine Results Page. Not a well known word, except by
SEOs, this meant it
was not a particularly competitive target, allowing for the tracking of
competing sites to be reasonably easy.
SEO professional
Brett
Tabke claims to have invented the abbreviation in 2000 in a forum post on
his site webmasterworld.com.
The competition officially began on
January 16,
2004, and ended
April 16.
There was no entry fee and no prize, and the competition was open to all.
Carcasherdotcom Seocontest
- Dates:
1 February 2006 - 31 December 2006
- Keyword: carcasherdotcom seocontest
- Monthly Prize: Per month starting March 1st, $500 to the SEO,
whose website is in the first place on Google, $200 for Yahoo, and $100 for
MSN.
- End of contest Prize: 1st prize (1st in Google on December 31st),
$3,000 + 42" Plasma TV + $12,000 SEO Contract for 2007, second prize (1st in
Yahoo on December 31st), $2,000 + Sony PSP, third prize (1st in MSN on
December 1st), $1,000 + Apple iPod.
- Sponsor: CarCasher.Com
The Four Required Words
- Dates:
15 February 2006 - 15 May 2006
- Keyword: "the four required words"
- Monthly Prize: None.
- End of contest Prize: 1st in Google ($100 + Icon), 1st in MSN
($20), 1st in Yahoo ($20), 1st in A9 ($20), 1st in Google Images ($20), 1st
in A9 Images ($20), 1st in Ask Images ($20).
- Sponsor: various
This is the first contest that uses a quoted expression. This is also the
first contest that targets image search engines. Finally there is a collective
subcontest (without prize) that allows forums to compete.
retsambew dash klat for Charity
- Dates:
03 April 2006 - 1 September 2006
- Keyword: "retsambew dash klat for Charity"
- Monthly Prize: None.
- End of contest Prize: Total cash value prizes total $4,910.30 for
1st through 5th place.
- Sponsor: various
This contest hosted by Webmaster-Talk.com has a unique set of conditions
including: The use of a brand new domain name. No remotely hosted blog domains
are allowed. No Subdomains are allowed. The contest keywords can not be used in
the domain (with dashes or without any dashes) (subpages with the keyword is
fine). The winning page must also link to a Charity of their choice from
Give.org. See the contest announcement page for further details.
Sex Web Cams Zoom11
- Dates:
01 April 2006 - 1 October 2006
- Keyword: "Sex Web Cams Zoom11"
- Monthly Prize: $100 each month for No.1 on Google/Yahoo/Msn
Starting 01
April.
- End of contest Prize: Total prizes will be more then $20K
according to the amount of the relevant web pages.
- Sponsor: Zoom11.com (Adult site)
Zoom11.com contest is the first known SEO + Porn contest. It combines
affiliate program ($1000 bonus for the best affiliate), SEO skills on the
biggest search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN, and marketing skills - the
prizes are in the webmasters hand to set.
Zoom11 SEO Updates
See also
External links
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