How to Run a Good SEO Contest

SEO contest have been running for some time, the first known recorded contest was the German SEO contest Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat in 2002^[1]. Later on in 2004 the first English-language contest was nigritude ultramarine^[2]. For the next following years more and more contest came out, some good ones, some bad ones, some with a very large prize, and some with just little prizes, but what makes a good SEO contest? A good contest is one that is fair to all competitors, avoiding any negative perceptions on the SEO industry, and has clear rules in determining the winners. Below are a few SEO contest guidelines of what makes a good SEO contest.

1. A Good SEO Contest Avoids Any Unfair Advantage of a Competitor
   1. Domain Age and Page Age
      Entries should be brand new sites on a brand new domain. Page age and domain are ranking factors, that those with old websites will have an advantage over new sites.
   2. Keywords in the Domain
      If the official keyword is the exact phrase of a dot com domain, this will have an advantage of sending signals to Google that the domain is the official brand of the targeted keyword and Google does prefer to determine the official brand page of a keyword. Although it may not be 100% accurate in determining a branded term or not, but it will try its best and an exact phrase .com domain of the contest keyword is showing these sites. Although just because you have the exact phrase as your domain, you automatically have a large lead in the game. There is what Google calls the Exact Match Domain (EMD) update where Google tries to determine if an exact match domain to a search keyword is really an official site, or just a site riding on the popularity of the keyword and does not really have quality content on pages. The EMD update will penalize these sites and get pushed down in ranking.
      
      In the SEO World Championship^[3] in 2007 organized by Swedish SEO company GetUpdated, used the keyword GlobalWarming Awareness2007, and just when the contest started, GetUpdate has already registered the domains globalwarmingawareness2007.com, globalwarmingawareness2007.net, and globalwarmingawareness2007.org.
      
      In a contest by Branders.com called Promote Your Business^[4] in 2008 used the keyword phrase: promotional items corporate gifts srednarb. And to avoid any keyword in domain advantage, the official rule was each competitor can only use a maximum of 2 words from the contest phrase within the domain name.
   
   
   
2. SEO Contest should use a keyword phrase that has zero search results
   A contest keyword phrase can have zero results if a unique word that does not exist in any dictionary and is not used by anyone. This gives an equal ranking baseline among all competitors. No site will have any previous keyword history usage advantage. No other site will have any relationship advantages from getting links from sites using the keyword.
   
   
3. An SEO Contest Should Not Disturb Any Current Industry
   This is probably more of an ethical request. Following this rule is not only good for the SEO industry, but also avoids search engine algorithm changes that always throw of SEO professionals.
   
   In February of 2008, Morgan Carey of Real Estate Webmasters decided to run an SEO contest with the keyword phrase: Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World^[5] The problem with this keyword, they were common everyday words. This caused many search results to pop up in the Search Engine Results Pages that were not about real estate agents. They were all about SEO contest. What does this mainly do?
   
   
   1. It gives a bad search experience
      People interested in actually searching for a good real estate agent ends up not finding one and just finding a bunch of sites about SEO. In effect this gives SEO professionals a negative impression and will be generally perceived as spammers.
   2. Google will want to clean up the SERPs
      Google makes money from ads served in search results. Advertisers want to serve ads on Google because many people use it. Many people use Google because of the quality of search results. And if the quality of search results suffer, they lose the users, and when they lose the user, they lose the advertisers and the money. To avoid this from happening, Google will find a way to clean up the search results and will find algorithmic implementation that will affect all search results in general. So bear in mind, whenever there is an algorithmic change, most of the time, it was caused by the SEOs messing up the search experience.
   
   
   
4. Search Engine Parameters Should Be Very Specific
   Search engines may show different search results based on a number of factors, from localization, personalization, data center propagation, and other factors. Thus if SEO competitors are seeing a different result from the contest organizer, there can be some conflicts and complaints from different parties. Below are a few things that would be appropriate to clear up in the rules of an SEO competition:
   
   1. Google Country Version
      Google.com is the main Google website but there are many Google country versions on almost every ccTLD^[6]. Each Google site may show some discrepancies in search result even if searching for the same keyword.
   2. City Location
      Under Search tools, in some countries, a specific city can be mentioned. If the contest organizer does not clear up what city should be used, competitors may see different results.
   3. Personalization
      
      1. Log out of a Google Account
         Google has some personalization of results where it tries to analyze the type of results you prefer based on your browsing habits and search result selections. When logged into a Google account, these preferences are tied to that account.
      2. Run Incognito Mode
         Incognito Mode (Google Chrome) or Private Web Browsing (Firefox) are settings on your web browser to not save any cookies and web browsing history. As Google can also be looking into these sources of information of browsing habits, preferences and can still up with personalize results.
      3. Minimize Parameters
         For every search on Google, multiple parameters are still passed to them. From referring URL, button clicks, type of web browser, and much more. The more information passed, the more you are still identifiable even if running private browsing settings and logged off.
      4. Disable Personal Web Search
         Google has created a search parameter you can actually pass in the URL that specifically tells Google to turn of Personal Web Search.
   4. Avoid Propagation Issues
      Although this is less of a problem these days with Google's multiple updates in the past, from the Big Daddy and Caffeine updates where Google has been faster in updating all data centers worldwide, there can still be some small time frames where search results will still be different in different search engines. Thus a contest organizer can specific a specific IP address to use. But if an IP address is overused, Google may block off that IP for a long time. So it all depends on the contest organizer if they want to set this rule or not. If ever they will not, they will then have to specify the physical location of where the final results will be drawn since the Google displays search results often from the data center closest to the location of the user searching.

Although all of these rules are applied to Google, if the SEO contest for another search engine, just as apply as many of the items listed above as possible.

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References

1. de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc, Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat 2004 URL: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!msg/de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc/kRxkbzYoqP0/vhbHtbUrZloJ
2. Anil Dash Nigritude Ultramarine2004 URL: http://dashes.com/anil/2004/06/nigritude-ultra.html
3. GetUpdated, SEO World Championship 2007 URL: http://www.seoworldchampionship.com/
4. Benj Arriola, Promotional Items Corporate Gifts Srednarb – New SEO Contest 2008 URL: http://www.seoreligion.com/promotional-items-corporate-gifts-srednarb.html
5. Morgan Carey, Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest - A competition for Real Estate SEO supremacy 2008 Real Estate Webmasters, URL: http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/blogs/morgan-carey/4307/show/
6. Google Supported Domains, URL: http://www.google.com/supported_domains

What Are SEO Contest?

What is SEO?

There are many definitions of SEO, and taking it verbatim from Wikipedia as of February 4, 2013, the definition goes as follows:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.^[1]

If you would get the layman's definition of this term, most people would simply define it as the ways to increase ranking in search engines for a desired keyword phrase.

But personally, how I would define SEO would be:

SEO is the process of ongoing improvements of a website to increase revenue from organic search engine traffic.^[2]

SEO Contest Defined

Now that you know that SEO is, what is an SEO contest? There are many types of SEO contest that have been going over the years, many with different rules, but the general perception of an SEO contest is that this is a ranking contest. And the general rule involves a given contest keyword where the competitors will have to try their best to rank as high as possible in search engines for the contest keyword and the winner is determined by whoever has the highest ranking on a given deadline date.

Contest may differ in many ways, aside from the keyword phrase used and span of time the contest runs, some contest also consider rules that help eliminate unfair advantages of other contestants. Some of these rules can involve guidelines or limitations domain age, type of platform used, if keywords are allowed in the URL or not, number of pages, types of links, and many more.

A common rule in many contests is to avoid doing any blackhat SEO tactics which can be a debatable issue if this is giving an unfair advantage or is just doing self-inflicted harm because of the potential of getting a SEO contest entry banned in search engine results.

What is Blackhat SEO?

This can be defined in many ways and different people have different definitions. I will answer this by using a reply I once gave to someone who asked me the same question in the past.

Some people say Blackhat SEO is the illegal way of doing SEO. First thing is there is no SEO law. And if there is no law, there is nothing illegal. Some people say Blackhat SEO is the unethical way of doing SEO. Now what is defined as ethical and unethical is inconsistent from one SEO person to another. Search engines give out webmaster and SEO guidelines, and as the name guidelines is defined, they serve as guides. And when you have guides, this means you may or may not follow them. Some people define Blackhat SEO as SEO techniques that go against Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

What is my definition of Blackhat SEO? I share the same views as Quadzilla where he once defined Blackhat SEO as taking advantage of a small simple ranking factor and find ways to blow up this small ranking factor into large proportions in some automated way until it start to be a large SEO factor.

Blackhat SEO can be a bit risky since search engines do not like people gaming the system and can slap serious penalties where the worst is getting banned in search engines.^[3]

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References:

1. Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization 2013 Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
2. Benj Arriola, Demystifying SEO: What really goes into an SEO campaign 2010 6th Annual E-Commerce Summit, San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau URL: http://www.slideshare.net/BenjArriola/demystifying-seo-what-really-goes-into-a-comprehensive-seo-campaign
3. Joshua Riddle, Interview with SEO Guru Benj Arriola 2010 Matters of Grey, URL: http://mattersofgrey.com/interview-with-seo-guru-benj-arriola/