Dave Pasternack has decided to rile up the SEO followers again, and this time they are determined to return the favor… at least from a SERP point of view. Pasternack conducted an interview with DMNews titled Is SEO Rocket Science, which pretty much opened the metaphorical floor up to thorough blasting of the growng industry.
This time, however, there appears to be some repercussions Pasternack is going to have to face extending beyond mere blog post responses. Threadwatch, by the behest of Aaron Wall, is holding an SEO contest to see who rank the highest for the keyword set of “Dave Pasternack” (oddly enough, his about me page from Did-it.com didn’t even make the first page of Google… and that’s before the Threadwatch competition).
Concerning the competition, the webmaster for the who ranks in the first position at 12pm EST on March 1st wins $1000. Not content to stop there, Threadwatch will also reward $100 to whoever has “the most interesting” PPC ad for the same keyword set. Gentleman (and ladies) start your SEO engines.
Speaking of blog post responses, IncrediBILL has posted a scathing response to Pasternack’s DMNews article. In his post, Bill takes a look at the keyphrases Did-it should be targeting and checks to see where they rank in Google. The results, from an SEO perspective, were quite poor:
It appears Did-it wants to be known for “search engine marketing news and resources” yet isn’t anywhere to be seen in the top 100, then using quotes you only get sites not even related to Did-it. The shorter version “search engine marketing” does show up in the top 100 when you slap quotes around the phrase and it’s down in the 80’s. Now they are in the top 10 for “paid search optimization” which is in their title, but take out the word paid and they vanish.
Apparently, the lesson here is, “don’t make outlandish claims if your own work doesn’t remotely back them up”. We’ll keep you posted on who wins the Threadwatch competition.
