Wednesday, January 17, 2007

GlobalWarming Awareness2007 SEO Contest

The latest search engine optmization contest also aims to become one of the biggest – with prices including a car (1st place) and a Caribbean cruise (2nd place). SEO contests are used to try out new optimization techniques, promote the contest creator’s website, or just have some fun with search engines. This particular competition by Sweden’s Eastpoint Media SEO team is proudly declaring itself to be the “SEO World Championship,” the “most prestigious SEO contest.” Your target phrase to optimize for is globalwarming awareness2007, but there’s a couple of twists:

• You must optimize for a new domain (created on or after January 15th this year).
• This is a whitehat SEO contest, so you are asked to adhere to the Google guidelines (expect some fights over whether a particular well-ranking participant conforms to the guidelines).
• You must include an SEO World Championship link or (linked or unlinked) banner graphic, as well as your contact information (like email).
• Your score is calculated on May 1st, 2007 by checking all 3 big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN – with 10 points awarded to the first position, 9 points awarded to the second position, and so on for each engine (if two players lock scores, the better Google position trumps – the rules page doesn’t mention what happens in the unlikely case that two locking contestants aren’t appearing in the Google top 1000).

The current top contender for the keywords in Google is Globalwarming-Awareness2007.com, a site by an Italian SEO team which showcases some contest shirts, but we’re likely to see a lot of shuffles in the GYM results for this over the coming months. It’s likely that after a while, the contest creator’s site itself will rank best in Google.

By its selection of target keywords, this SEO contest also tries to raise awareness for our global warming challenge. I just hope the contest won’t pollute the real results for searches for “global warming”. Traditionally that shouldn’t happen, as the query “globalwarming” is something very different than the query “global warming”, though as search engines become more and more fuzzy, we can’t be too sure about any of this. Talking about pollution, is the first prize, a car, really the right incentive when you want to raise awareness on enviromental issues?

[Thanks Alek!]

GlobalWarming Awareness20 ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (27)

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