An SEO contest is an activity awarding prizes that challenges search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s). This type of contest is controversial because it often leads to massive amounts of link spamming as participants try to boost the rankings of their pages by any means available.
The organizing body of an SEO competition may hold the activity without promotion of a product or service in mind; or they may organize a contest in order to market something on the Internet. Participants can showcase their skills and potentially discover and share new techniques for promoting websites.
History
The first recorded SEO Contest was Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat by German webmasters, started on 2002 November 15 in the German-language usenet group de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc. In the English-language world, the nigritude ultramarine competition by SearchGuild and DarkBlue (Dark Blue Sea Ltd) is widely acclaimed as the mother of all SEO contests[citation needed]. 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 number 1 on Google in three months’ time for the search phrase seraphim proudleduck.[citation needed]
In the first quarter of 2005, people were competing for the term loquine glupe, spawning web sites ranging from shampoo advertising to holiday resorts.
Internationally, in 2005 two major contests took place in Europe. In Germany the Hommingberger Gepardenforelle (Hommingbergian cheetah trout) 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 its goal to promote SEO in Poland and to get search engines companies’ attention for the Polish market.
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 contributed the winner’s money, he donated it to the number 2 winner.
Tactics
Some webmasters resort to spam, while others use white-hat optimization techniques, like providing good content covering the competition, or optimizing page titles.[1] 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.
Rules and limitations can 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.com was open for new domains only. That meant that the contestants couldn’t 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. It was expected that the Redscowl Bluesingsky game would be won by a domain of the style “redscowl-bluesingsky.tld” - bound to attract natural links and to 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 site. 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 (using the phrase v7ndotcom elursrebmem) 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 www.SEO-sk.com contests were updated regularly up until the official start date of January 15, 2006.
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