LZZR

July 3, 2006

What SEO contests are made for

It’s been a buzz for quite some time now - to set up a SEO contest and rip the benefits. All possible varieties tend to spring up from moderately decent elursrebmem to shamelessly self-promoting CarCasher.
Sometimes I wonder - what’s the point of it all as it is hard to understand what exactly might bring seemingly sane individuals to participate in so obviously vain undertaking?
On the surface it seems to be just a simple willywagging excersise but is there more to it?
Of course if you really win you start building yourself a SEO reputation or might get accepted into the esoteric circle of SEO gurus. But there is only just one winner - the owner of the conters. Apart from obvious things like:

he/she or they get also something much more interesting - namely a new search term, search phrase or even a whole search cloud previously nonexistent.

Let’s see how the thing works taking elursrebmem as an example. Surely no one searched for this term prior to the date of the contest announcement. This word did not exsits and hence was not indexed by any SE. As soon as a contest begins it generates an explosive amount of searches for this word both naturally (Let’s check how we are doing on Google for the contest. type) and kind of unnaturally to use a softer expression.

Consequently, unless the search is manually banned or blacklisted by Search Engines (a practice commonly referred to as euristics by various GoogleGuys) it should be treated “as normal” by SE algos. In effect it would mean that suddenly a totally new object appeared somewhere in this world and searchers became extremely interested in it. In othe words buzz that begins to spread. Now who was the first to publish the info on this exiting new word and to which site all of the links related to the word point? I hope your guess is right. Now, what this stie gets? The status of AUTHORITY on the subject and this seems to be priceless :-).

Note, however, a serious weak point of this linking strategy - it creates a simple many-to-one (or star) structure that would obviously look a bit suspicious to SE. To look more natural all the participating sites have to be interlinked in some way, directly or indirectly. Fortunately there is a simple way to overcome this obstacle which I suggest all future SEO contest organiser should use: rules of a contest should state that to qualify a site should link to at least one other (or better more) of participating sites. A social experiment on a grander scale! But wait, doesn’t it remind you of something? Ponzi schemes? MLM marketing?

Is this however a street with only one way traffic? Well, not exactly. When you see a SEO Contest going on you might jump on that train too. Using a tail catching tactic you might put a word of that contest or even a link to contest rules somwhere on your website pretending you are a part of the contest too. If you do it early enough you might still be able to catch the wawe of a newly formed tsunami of searches for that search term and if you are lucky to ride this wawe for a long time.

Anyway, the whole idea of becoming a SEO Contest organiser sounds so good that I am beginning to think of setting up my own LZZR SEO Contest (guess what the word for that contest would be)?

tags: free inbound links, free traffic, lzzr, lzzr seo contest, seo contest, buzz, contests, elursrebmem, linking, search phrase, search term