Yesterday I wrote about the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem SEO contest. I actually have no belief that I will win this contest, but I created a page to see how I would rank compared to others. My primary goal is to pick up a few tips from the those that have the time and inclination to try and win the prize.
A handful of things that I've observed so far are:
- Some contestants are posting comments on blogs with links back to their entry pages. I know this because this is one of those blogs. The nice requesters are giving permission to post on their sites as well. The not so nice ones are posting nonsense comments and embedding a link.
- Yesterday, Google was showing 10 pages for the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem keywords. Today, the number is at 12,300. That's a huge increase and demonstrates that pages are be added to the index quickly.
- Some brand new sites are showing in the results. This flies in the face of the Google sandbox idea.
- Of the top sites in the search engine results, 3 use a variation of the contest name plus .com, .co.uk, .org, etc. I'm not sure if the domain name makes a difference or if the people that have these domain names are just better at SEO overall.
- V7ndotcom Elursrebmem - Observations Round 2
- V7ndotcom Elursrebmem
- V7ndotcom Elursrebmem - Observations Round 3
- Redscowl Bluesingsky
- SEO Contests: Good or Bad?
Entries (RSS)
The Google 'Sand Box' is real…However, you can construct sites in such a fashion as to not trigger this delay. In fact, you can construct sites that immediately rank well for competitive keywords and are able to pass on valuable links to other sites; the true lesson of this contest would have been for novice SEO's (or SEO folks in less competitve genres) to understand how to quickly obtain such results free of spamming techniques.
Then again, I may be partial to such 'lessons' on account of my general laziness: The quicker I obtain results the quicker I can sit back and collect checks:)