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Monday, April 3, 2006

The CarCasher SEO Contest

“Carcasherdotcom seocontest” is the target phrase to optimize for in the latest Google SEO contest, even when the old one isn’t even finished yet. It becomes clear that the price money in SEO contests is increasing, and more and more companies utilize those contests as simple form of advertising... especially by inserting the company or site name into the target phrase (and making it mandatory to link back to or mention the company in question).

This contest, which started on February 1st, has monthly prizes of $500 for whoever’s top on Google the first of each month. The prize for the grand final on December 31 is $3,000, a 42” plasma TV, as well as a $12,000 SEO Contract for 2007. The second prize is $2,000 and a PSP, and the third price is $1,000 along with an iPod. Now assuming you score the first place right now, you’ll make $11,000 (plus that SEO contract) – if the prize money gets indeed paid, that is.

Now this SEO contest doesn’t allow “dirty SEO” techniques to be used. Then again, it’s nearly impossible to ensure those rules are followed. For one thing, you can’t track everything a competitor does. Also, it’s very hard to judge what is dirty, and what’s clean. And even if you do find e.g. spammy comment links, who’s gonna decide if those are by the site owner that is linked to? It’s just as possible that someone is simply trying to kick out a competitor by making them look bad.

At the moment, Google shows 1,800,000 result pages for CarCasherDotCom SeoContest, with Shortcuts.biz being the number one result. As usual, domains like carcasherdotcom-seocontest.com and carcasherdotcomseocontest.com are already reserved (and ranking well).

[Thanks Alek Komarnitsky.]

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