A few months ago, two companies in the search optimization space teamed up to start a contest, based on a challenge to see who could be the first result for the gibberish phrase "Nigritude Ultramarine". Winning the contest consisted of being the top result on Google for that search either on June 7 (the "player" prize) or a month later, on July 7 (the "stayer" prize).
I've had a fairly poor impression of the Search Engine Optimization Industry, so I entered the contest on June 4. My site became the number one search result late on June 8, so I missed winning the first round, but I held the position for the rest of the month (and my site is still the first result, as of this writing) and won the Stayer's Prize.
My prize was a beautiful Sony monitor. Michael Robertson and the other folks involved with the contest were cordial and prompt, and the monitor arrived in the middle of last week. In fact, I've been in the middle of moving, and just after we'd settled in, the first ring at our doorbell was from UPS, bearing a big Sony box courtesy of Amazon. Now that's a housewarming gift.
But more interesting to me has been the reaction people have had, first to my entry in the contest, second to my ranking in the search results (the term people seem to favor in email is "dominance" but that doesn't sound very humble) and finally their response to my win of the second-stage prize.
There are a significant number of really supportive emails, of course. People generously linked to my original Nigritude Ultramarine post, and I think they felt a sense of accomplishment in helping me win. There's nothing the blogosphere loves more than angry mob justice, and I probably benefitted from tapping into a bit of angry mob antipathy towards the SEO industry. Though many, perhaps even most, people in the SEO industry behave ethically, the reality is that much of the SEO industry has treated the weblog medium with an attitude ranging from crass opportunism or exploitation to downright abuse, in the form of comment spam, referral spam, and fake, content-free blogs.
So, as with all things in the blog world, we confuse an angry link with actual Fight The Power action, and this is one of the few cases where that link actually had some effect. Predictably, I got a decent number of emails from angry members of the SEO industry. The most legitimate were from people who use ethical and honorable ways of helping optimize their clients' sites for search engines, and resented my insufficiently nuanced assessment of their industry.
I do agree that there are people doing great work, encourage valid, semantically-rich markup, and well-targeted content that's easy to link to. I would think, though, that the efforts of that group are better spent on either defining a code of ethics by which businesses can judge members of the SEO industry, or by working to repair the image of their chosen field. That the entire endeavor is regularly equated with spammers and referred to as "scum" isn't the fault of those of us who talk about the business. Web communities are good at collaborative problem solving and ferreting out obscure information; couldn't the legitimate SEO community band together to find out the identities of known SEO spammers and out them?
There were even some fairly detailed critiques that said I shouldn't have entered the contest because this isn't my business. I can understand the resistance to an outsider entering any community's contests, but I think that, though I did essentially enter the contest on a lark, it served to illustrate a larger point. MBA types like to say that the rail industry didn't understand it was in the transportation business, not the train business, and so lost out to the development of the interstate highways and air travel. That's an oversimplification, but the SEO industry does need to learn that its real business is in helping clients make information that's compelling enough that potential customers want to find it. Once they've created that information, it behooves them to make it as accessible and sharable as possible, and to provide affordance for easily keeping it up to date.
Publishing of interesting content that readers can share with each other, provide feedback on, and easily update? Hey, waitaminute... that is my business! And the comment that "Sadly, Dash put a cap on the amount of new information that this contest was going to generate." is just sad. A bunch of quitters are blaming me because they don't want to keep trying?
There's a part of me that's always felt that, if you're a professional at a certain trade, and I can come in as an amateur and do better than you, then you probably suck. Generally, it's an ethic that I'm reminded of when I see amateur hour at a comedy show or when I find myself in a low-end art gallery. "I could do better than this." If this is your trade and you can't beat someone who came in at the last minute to enter a contest that's gotten the attention of nearly everyone in your field, it's time to rethink your strategy.
My suggestions? Write good content. Develop an audience that cares about what you're doing. Do something that's relevant to people in your field.
Finally, I got a whole bunch of people celebrating my win because I'm Indian. It's fascinating to me, the kind of tribal rah-rah attitude that it reveals. But I wonder if part of the reason that people in India and in the diaspora are so supportive is because Indians have been pretty good networkers during the existence of the computer industry. I don't belong to any Indian trade associations or anything like that, but I can see how people benefit from doing so.
So thanks to everyone who said they were glad to see an Indian win the contest, but I probably don't fit your definition of "Indian". And, as I mentioned above, this isn't really my line of work anyway.
The last fun part for me is in seeing the reactions. A lot of other bloggers felt a sense of shared accomplishment, which is appropriate given how many people generously linked to my post. "We won!" seemed to be a common sentiment. And as much as I liked seeing stuff like the Wired News story, the highlight for me was getting to see my name in Hebrew. "אניל דאש" would look pretty nice up there at the top of the page in purple, wouldn't it?
Write good content. Develop an audience that cares about what you’re doing.
Deep down, I think the reason many bloggers dislike the whole SEO industry is due to this fact. Bloggers exist and are defined by content. They’re all about the content. Many examples of SEO work are giant byzantine sites filled with pointless gibberish, optimized to the hilt to drive confused users to ads. Anyone doing a search on Google for travel or hotel info has certainly fell into one of these quicksand-like sites that seem to have some content in betweeen a zillion ads and other links to internal pages of confusing quasi-content.
Bloggers have known since day one that the way to get traffic to your blog is to write well. Google does a pretty good job of reinforcing that, and not just for blogs, but any content that helps people. Writing good content is hard and copywriting isn’t seen as something companies regularly pay for, so in the place of good content we find gaming strategies for doing everything but improving the quality of information on a site.
…the kind of tribal rah-rah attitude that it reveals…
So thanks to everyone who said they were glad to see an Indian win the contest, but I probably don’t fit your definition of “Indian”.
Well, seems to me like you don’t (want to) fit in with your definition of what you think we define as an Indian. :) Pretty uncool to be an Indian, eh?
(I am a tribal Indian with a rah-rah attiude who feels good about your winning too :)
“דאש אניל” would look pretty nice up there at the top of the page in purple, wouldn’t it?
The Oriya is typographically nicer, I think :)
I support the idea that if your content is sound, structured, and sexy, you will succeed. But I’m not sure your actions in the SEO contest was a pure example of this idea.
You started out with a significant page rank and then tapped out your social net for favors in the form of links. Furthermore, not only did you ask for people to link to you, but you asked for them to include the term Nigritude Ultramine in the link (“Do me a favor: Link to this post with the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine”). Isn’t this the most basic tool in any search engine gaming toolbox?
I feel like your win would have been much sweeter had you written up an entry about the Nigritude Ultramarine SEO contest, just published quietly on your blog, and let people naturally link to you as they would normally (e.g. “Check it, Anil talks about an SEO contest”).
thelearner, I think my point was more that people identify with someone who achieves something based on how they see their own identity. Bloggers saw the contest as if a blogger had won, Indians saw the contest as if an Indian had won.
And Jeff, I think your assessment would be fair if I were conducting a scientific experiment. It was a contest, so I did what I thought would help me to win. I bet someone could use an unpromoted post as a control in a pagerank experiment, and I’d be glad to link to it if someone did.
I agree with Jeff on this one. You can’t toot your horn as a winnerthrough great content if you simply had your readers produce what you consider to be spam on their sites.
If you had written about it, and your readers linked to you because you had interesting content on the matter, I would be able to credit you with winning the competition through having good content. Instead, you won the competition through asking people to create irrelevant links on their sites. The fact that you have the power to do this is due to your great content, but that just means you have a bigger gun than the normal SEO guys. You’re still just using your gun, just like them.
You’re right about this not being a scientific experiment. If you’re saying that you just did whatever it took to win, don’t go all self righteous like you championed one for the greater good of content on the Internet.
I appreciate your desire for content to be rich, but this appears to boil down to someone with power dabbling in the affairs of those with less. Imagine if Britney Spears had asked people to link to her site with that search term in it.
But Anil is Britney Spears.
this appears to boil down to someone with power dabbling in the affairs of those with less.
I have more power in search engine optimization than people who are professionals in the field? And that’s somehow a problem for me. Bzzt. (Hint: It means they suck.)
I only support you because you are specifically a fellow Oriya… nay… a fellow Dash ;)
Hello Anil,
I just wanted to stop by and congratulate you on the win. I’m one of the administrators at SearchGuild, so I’ve been following the whole contest since before it started.
I could get into the debate over Good versus Evil, Right versus Wrong, Great Taste versus Less Filling, Content versus Spam, but I have seen this argument done innumerable times within the SEO industry itself and NEVER once seen anything resolved by it.
Instead, I’ll say this: Well Done! I don’t recall any rules saying you had to follow any prescribed methods for gaining your ranking, or that this contest was only for a select few to enter, so in my book you won fair and square.
As a side note, I’m installing Movable Type and for many of my clients to use as their CMS. It happens to very well suited for SEO. ;o)
Sincerely,
Aesopian from SearchGuild
I’m late to this discussion, but wanted first to congratulate you on your win. It’s ironically amusing that the game was gamed, and it doesn’t bother me in the least how it was done. You did it; kudos to you!
Secondly, you make an excellent point about content. To be fair, while SEOs are in the business of improving rankings of pages, they’re not always involved in creation of content (and sometimes are not allowed to affect anything on the client’s site at all). I view this as a limitation in the SEO-only field, since SEO is a form of Web marketing or, perhaps, simply of promotion — because the bottom line “product” of SEOs is highly ranked pages, they may end up with pages anywhere in the scale of valuable/not valuable. Where the SEO is also, say, a marketer, one may find that the website has actually been improved. Unfortunately, any discussion of ethics in the SEO industry has usually led to loud disputes, for all the reasons that I take it you already understand (and which is not to say that I disagree with you at all).
Bloggers, of course, are constantly creating their own content — which is of course what one hopes gets ranked well. However, I can say that this is a different scenario than the usual commercial website, where constant content creation is not always in the cards (as well, very often, “selling” clients on the idea of much content at all is a bit of an uphill battle, which I’m sure other designers have encountered).
And, lastly, I say all this as a web designer/marketer who has included SEO as part of the package for years, and who has lately dropped an email newsletter in favor of two blogs.
Thanks for listening.
Diane
Anil, will you parttake in v7n’s new contest?
Hi Anil
This is Asif Anwar, a SEO expert from Bangladesh. Day by day, the world is seeing the power of Indians. My father scored highest in history of Journalism in Missouri University. The fascinating fact is, the top ranks are held by the Indians, followed by the Chinese. One of his teachers quoted, “You (Indians) will be the brain of the world in future”. I see that this future is very near.
SEO is a good thing. When I was novice in Search Engine Marketing, I was very much interested in the strategy. But, when you are running an international business, you need to be smarter to survive. Therefore, I have switched to other tasks, like multi-lingual keyword research, visitor analysis, blogging, etc. I would say that SEO is not the only thing that you can think of. It is just a tool. But, to sustain, you would need many tools like that.
I boldly support you that, good contents is good SEO practice. Moreover, good contents also give better image. In business, good contents also have great value.
Next time you go for another contest, please notify me. I may link to your page in one of my Blogs.
Asif Anwar Web Information Officer The Golden Fibre Trade Centre Limited (GFTCL): Leading exporter of Roselle Hemp, Kenaf, & Jute Fibers and Jute Textile Products from Bangladesh 751 Sat Masjid Road, Dhanmondi, Dhaka-1209, Bangladesh.
I just recently joined one of these contest just to see where my seo skills have gotten me compared to everyone else. It seems it’s a little easier than I thought and I hope to have some more competition. But I like this post , even though I am not Indian, I happen to be from africa and the thing I’ve noticed most about the Internet is the fact that everyone BUT americans are really pushing to the opporturnity the internet truly presents. People with a poor background tend to be more focused because their whole lives have been nothing bu thard work. And this could be said for Indians as well.
Thank You
Thank you for sharing your experience and tips. I wish I could have as much support as yours. Wish me luck on SEOcontest2008.
Oh! Perfect job! Very interesting and useful post. I add your interesting blog in my iGoogle page!