GlobalWarming Awareness2007 SEO Contest
Globalwarming Awareness2007: thoughts and considerations
The moment for the coming-out has arrived: I’m engaged into an Search Engine Optimization contest, the so-called SEO World Championship.
The contest is going to finish, after 3 months and an half, on 1st of may, 2007: it’s just twelve days far. What have I done in this period? Not much, in fact at the moment I do not rank -at all- for the keyphrase of the contest (GlobalWarming Awareness2007 - I love that keyword! 
). Meanwhile, others came out with their websites: I’ve seen almost all of them developing old-school link building strategies such as link trading, mass directory submissions, keyword stuffing, and the like. Very few sites in this competition that can rely on a crystal-clean link profile, in my opinion.
Such old-school-seo’d websites, even having a collection of very “suspectable” inbound links, rank, and they rank very good, too: but it’s obvious, there’s nobody other than these SEOs trying to achieve rankings for that keyword, nor producing a document that even contains this apparently meaningless couple of words.
I too am now building SEO-targeted links for my not-so-special page optimized for the keyword GlobalWarming Awareness2007, but I have a secret weapon un-revealed until this moment: that page stands on a domain that is very well linked, altough it’s younger than the SEO Contest itself - as according to the rule board. As “very well linked” I mean, thousands of spontaneous backlinks acquired over time from diverse sources and with various anchor text (most of them containing “global warming” or “globalwarming” in it), and many of that links comes from websites and pages having the global warming and climate change issues as their main topic.
Believe it or not, I didn’t place nor personally asked for ANY of these links. They are just spontaneous: it “just” happened that masses of webmasters, bloggers and journalists found themselves appreciating a resource, and they were happy to cite, suggest, talk about and, last but not least 
link to it on their own, free will.
More over, this domain’s XML feed, so as some of the website URLs, had been saved/subscribed by MANY people in their search engine’s feed readers/bookmarks accounts: as long as a search engine considers the user’s behavior in relation to a website in its calculation of the value of that website, I can count on a greater consideration from the engine’s perspective; and, further, I can rely on an additional bounce of backlinks every time I publish an item and deliver it via XML feed: some of them are just automated ones, some others not. Search engines know that, and they know and take consideration of the amount of traffic that that site receives day after day.
I don’t know if I’ll manage to achieve some kind of success within this SEO Contest, as I put very few efforts in it (I took just few days - less than a week in total- to produce and promote the 4 pages that compose the website), but I’m sure that if I had the time to work on it some hours a day, for three months, I would had been happy to produce and promote dozens of linkbait pieces, and backlinks would had flown in hundreds of thousands.
A workmate of mine in the SEO field (Hi!) commented the operation with such words: this is the future of the SEO strategies. And I can’t disagree with him. Promoting linkbait pieces through top trafficked social media sites, is an effective (and funny!) way to develop a link popularity that can be further improved with classic SEO link building: with such a rock-solid basis, your efforts in manual link building will be much more effective!
About SEO W.C. organization: how can non-SEOs build up an SEO contest?
As said, I didn’t put much efforts in this challenge because of the time. I was really busy, and still I am, in this period.
But there’s another reason why I didn’t work much around this SEO Contest: I have a very low consideration of the SEO skills of the people that are behind the SEO World Championship, the Eastpoint Media AB staff.
I mean, they came out bidding on adwords for every SEO Contest keyword of the past, organized this contest that from its name (and payoff, too) poses itself as “the world’s most prestigious SEO Contest”, and they’re not even SEOs. Not good ones, at the very least.
Want the proofs? I will cite just two quotes from their former administrator on the forum, his nickname is “seowc2007″.
Someone (me) pointed out that since the beginning of the contest, there were (french) people who were doing 301 redirects from old and widely linked websites to their domain of choice (since, as I mentioned before, one of the rules stated that nobody could compete with a domain registered before the official beginning of the contest).
I was asking (omitting to say who was involved) if this practice of 301s had to be considered allowed or not, since that it wasn’t specified in the official rule board. Their answer (bold is mine):
If we would disqualify contestants that gets 301 redirects then it would be easy for others to sabotage by making their own domains redirect to competitors sites.
A 301 redirect is allowed to do because the purpose of a 301 redirect according to everyone is to show that the site has moved.
We can not keep track of who makes 301 redirects, it will be impossible for us to monitor that.[then, further down in the same forum topic] It seems to me that many of the people here believes that we can control and check 301 redirects. The fact is that we can not.
It would be an easy way to deliver sabotage to any competitor’s site if it was forbidden, so we must allow it: unappointable. But, be serious: are you saying that is impossible to keep track of 301 redirects redirecting to a little set of domains? Maybe you are joking?
I will teach you an easy way to do that (but there are many): search for backlinks of a domain on Google, and take note of the backlinks that the domain you want to check receives. It won’t be a complete list (just an abstract), but if one relies on 301′d old domains to gain backlinks for a new domain, chances are that at least one of the page that contains a 301′d backlink to that domain will show up in the list. Now, all you have to do is to search for the first lack of match between the domain name and the HREF’s on the pages you’ve found with the “link:” command, and eventually compare that page with an older version (you may use another engine’s cache, or archive.org: it’s your choice). It’s not impossible, is it?
But the funny part has yet to come!
In response to the question: from where will you check results?
Their answer (bold is theirs):
We will check the results from Sweden.
Different computers and our own developed SEO tools will be used to determine the winner. We have already compared this to results taken from the U.S several times and we get the same results over and over again.
We will check rankings from the .com version of all the three search engines. To clarify even further we will absolutely not use any other SE domain extension like .se, .fi, .dk and .no to check results.
This is a completely unsatisfying answer: it lacks informations about datacenter’s IP, requesting IPs (”various computers” is just not enough), browser brand/version/language, login information about any search engine’s account (absolute lack of, I hope)… Last, but not least, they demonstrate to have absolutely no acknowledgement of the fact that it’s not a matter of TLD extension of the search engine’s site, rather than is a matter of the language set into the querystring, the browser/OS informations sendt along with queries to the engine, the “history” of each user - yes, even if it’s not logged in….
Probably these details won’t change the results substantially in this case, but there’s still the fact that they did not answer the question in their forum, anymore. Lack of seriousness, or lack of competence?
Anyway, observing these enlighting demonstrations of that deep knowledge of the insights of SEO, I don’t think that they’ve really “developed an SEO Tool” being other than a web browser opened on Google (dot com, of course! ).