DarkBlue, an affiliate network, has launched a SEO contest that has the SEO world churning out optimized pages and links (with optimized anchor text) for the selected term, Nigritude Ultramarine.
Discuss the Nigritude Ultramarine contest in WebProWorld.
The contest rewards one Player – he who ranks first on June 7th, and one Stayer – he who ranks first on July 7th. The Player wins an iPod, while the Stayer wins a Sony 17″ Flat Panel monitor.
DarkBlue launched a blog to cover the contest.
It’s fascinating to see how quickly Google’s index filled with pages optimized for “nigritude ultramarine.” DarkBlue selected a term with no listings at all, launched the contest on the 7th, and at the time of this writing – 11am 051104 – there are 7,720 results.
Notice the advertisers who have bid on this term – a PPC engine that allows gambling ads and a guy fishing for email addresses who says he’ll send you optimization information. Now think about who’s going to be searching these terms – the SEO industry, including experts as well as those interested in how the contest is faring. Quite smart!
The DarkBlue blog as well as SEORoundTable have pointed to the various forums that are joining together to rank their pages higher for the term. A member from the SEOChat forum had the top position when I checked yesterday (reported in SEORoundTable).
Currently the spot’s held by a site from the UK, with an actual forum thread from InternetMarketingResearch in third. The thread’s got thousands of links pointing to it from supporter’s sites.
This brings up an interesting question though – what does an optimizer proove if he ranks high from thousands of links from forum friends?
This contest won’t really test SEO from a business perspective, as your forum buddies aren’t likely to get into the team spirit to help you rank your client’s site higher. Unless you pay them to be on your team of course.
Of course it’s not a forum thread that’s ranked at the top now. It does appear, though, that the winner of this particular contest will be the person with the most friends.
The real winner of the contest is DarkBlue – SEOers often sell affiliate products. DarkBlue is an affiliate network. The SEO world is buzzing about the contest. Guerilla marketing at its best, folks.
You can follow the race with this Nigritude Ultramarine graphing tool from DigitalPoint (who’s ALWAYS on point with new Google tools).
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
