Have these people gone mad? I say that facetiously of course.
I stumbled upon this rather strange sight (pun intended) the other day and I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. This was a blog that I thought was in some foreign language that I was unfamiliar with, or maybe I was just dense and this was beyond my intellectual capacity to comprehend. But no, I stumbled upon another curiosity birthed by cyberspace — that being an SEO contest, as quaint as the idea of economies or job markets being spawned by virtual environments such as The Sims and World Of Warcraft.
For the chance to win anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand in cash and prizes, you can join this contest which allows you to show off how skilled you are with Search Engine Optimization, the practice of rigging your website or weblog so that your site ranks well in search engines. The main focus of optimization is attempting to get a high page rank in Google for a given set of keywords, using various methods such as keyword utilization… and in desperation, keyword stuffing, spamming or outright plagiarism of the exact same posts.
As a first-time beholder of such an event, I was fascinated by how seriously some people took the experience. Then again, this is just another example of how the internet can have a grip on its people, and now I have proof that it can turn anyone into a blathering creature spouting out gibberish such as:
Nigritude Ultramarine,
Seraphim Proudleduck,
Loquine Glupe
and Shaastra Thamesportal Zalecenia Autophytes Invernesshire which is a phrase for an ongoing SEO contest happening at this very moment apparently.
What possesses people to spend their time fussing over their blogs and keyword stuffing the heck out of it? The same thing that consumes people to hang out in chat rooms, message boards and even to write in their blogs compulsively: the lure of the net, and in this case the lure of competition and perhaps the wish to win over the almighty Google BOT.
i’m on top — well, almost
ah.. it feels so good to be on top. i’m topping the search results for most search strings. like i said in my very first post, i’m gonna win this. how, do u ask? well, it pays in more ways than one to have your bro working in Google Inc. u get to know the inner secrets of search engine optimization, the way google does its rankings etc. and since these nonsense search strings were created for this event sponsored by google, i guess there should be no problem in tweaking results a wee bit 
i mean, what harm does it do to users? who’s gonna search for autophytes invernesshire except for some poor kiddos fighting it out to win the seo contest. lets see — pretty soon i will take over the few strings i am not on top. bro’s gotta find some time.
P.S. u’ll find that most of my posts are copied from atrieecs or priyaven. who has the time to write so much of nonsense? and why do it urself when u have such people to do it for u? outsource everything i say!!
2 Responses to “i’m on top — well, almost”
1. technorati guru Says:
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:50 pm
this is very strange. why are you doing this? does it matter? really i am curious why you seem to care so much about this contest
2. Autophytes Says:
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:54 pm
donno but I am kind of addicted to it.
I’m rooting for Sandy to win. Or is it Autophytes Invernesshire? After all, her his About page says to just call her him Thamesportal Zalecenia.
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Wow, this is really, really weird… But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people take SEO seriously given how much money a top place in Google results is worth. Still a bit funny to see that expertise carry over into such contests.
Shaastra!
I wasn’t voting for Sandy to win when he decided to spam all of the blogs on wordpress.com
@Silicon Valley Blogger:
Well.. I am a boy. So please use ‘he’ instead of ’she’. And thanx for rooting me to win
@engtech:
Hey, I am sorry for that. I have stopped spamming and have apolozised for that(http://sandy007smarty.seo.iitm.ac.in/2006/09/29/no-to-spam/). Now I am only spamming(keyword spamming) my own blog. Well.. I got to do that much atleast if I am participating in this contest.
This is the first time ( and may be the last time ) I am participating in such a contest. Thats why I am putting so much effort into it. This contest has already costed me dearly during my exams. That was when I first came to know about it and ignored my exams due to it.
Frankly, this is very bizarre to me.
As a pro in the space, I find it a little humorous that there is even a contest for ones professional SEO skills. Meaning, if someone is so good at optimizing they should “compete” in a real market where you get paid legitimately for your efforts.
These faux terms don’t represent an accurate portrayal of what pros in the space are asked to accomplish. For example, anyone can rank for a random, made up concept. But only the talented can rank for “car” or “real estate”.
Furthermore, any robot can automate gibberish into a blog posting a gazillion times per day. That practice is NOT SEO. It’s spamming, and generally looked down upon.
It takes someone with a very good understanding of semantics, Internet technology, marketing behavior, and usability to have a natural feel for doing reputable “white hat” SEO work.
I hope we can treat the web with a little more respect as search and the Internet continue to grow.
Sandy – I’ve made the appropriate corrections, sorry about that!
Tom – I appreciate your chiming in on this subject. I learn something new about the net every day and I can see how perhaps many people are unaware of what they’re really doing when they enter the world of the web as webmasters. I for one am learning the “hard” way by just experimenting and researching issues on a daily/weekly basis on what works/fails/is or is not acceptable online. Many times, “rules” are broken without one’s knowledge. So your expertise is highly appreciated in forums like this.
I also have an interest in writing more about stuff like this — those debatable issues that can be controversial among webmasters covering what is indeed appropriate online community “behavior”, for the purpose of enlightening others who may not be aware of such things.
Hie there.
I am vibhash, and this is my site http://vibhash.seo.iitm.ac.in
Well you haven’t seen the compleate pic…
The organisers of this event are crazy, they didn’t allowed to use our own domain or hosting, so i can’t do certainon page optimisations. I have to use the default template with ne plugins, and i cna’t help it out.
Not the second question comes about spamming…. Well this event was earlier started with diffrent keywords, and they forced us to take free hosting services like blogger, or wordpress… and coz of spamming blogs of most of the ppl were banned by wordpress & blogger… but my blog http://eforexlive.blogspot.com survived and i was at the top for most of the keywords.
So after that when they provided their own servers, then everyone started spamming heavvely, and they got to the top, and i was there at 4th position…
If you’ll see my earlier blogs, i wasn’t using any of the keywords. Just check out my archives of http://vibhash.seo.iitm.ac.in
But now its just 4-5 days left i have no option is to do what other’s are doin…
I was at the top plast time, so waht ever i do everyone copies exactly the same…even my blog posts…
You can check out the same blog post in sandy007smarty and i guess saarang too.
So now its just 4-5 days left i have only few options…if you can suggest me anything which will work fast, then it will be great.
Regards.
Vibhash.
Most of the Shaastra Contest sites are banned now by Google. Read http://sandy007smarty.blogspot.com/2006/10/so-its-true-google-is-intelligent-and.html
Hey… I have a small question. My blog site sandy007smarty.blogspot.com has been banned at digg. When I try to submit a story of my blog, it says users have reported that site, so I can’t submit that url.
Can you please tell me how to get it un-banned.
(This all happened when I was spamming wordpress and digg and … But now I have stopped. I am sorry for what I did before.)
Sandy — I am sorry about your predicament. The best thing to do is contact Digg or read their FAQ that may tell you what to do about your situation. If you explain your situation they may reinstate you. A lot of actions done by well-meaning people are due to ignorance and “overenthusiasm” and you can only go so far with certain behaviors. It’s always wise to check on the policies of websites before participating in their community.
I am looking for someone that can give me a hand with mod_rewrite for WordPress. Or any
tools or articles that someone may know of that can help me in SEOing my WordPress blog.
Please any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Thanks for contributing this article to my weekly ezine, ‘Brilliant Business Ideas’
I am not even aware that such contests exist. And it is really funny in some way. Isn’t the purpose of Google’s ranking to place the site on their search engine? I think repeating the keywords over and over again is, yes, a way to get indexed (?) but the site is meaningless.
What’s the price of this contest? Do you have information on this to fill me in? I don’t know why I suddenly became curious about this. Well, perhaps because it’s quite odd. And might be because Shaastra Thamesportal Zalecenia Autophytes Invernesshire is hard to pronounce. Haha
Marc Miller
My ‘big beef’ now is the same as it has been since the beginning of the net… there seems to always be people to tell us how to ‘beat’ the search engines, but rarely have I even found those people under the natural search results for the very keywords they are touting.
I use software for my SEM… it doesnt get you top spots over night for the top positions, but it makes it easy to get the low hanging friut, and so far, that has been good enough for me.
———————————————————–
Search Engine Marketing Software… Super Affiliate
I don’t understand this either. You can see why such SEO contests are frowned upon by many today. They seem to bring out and promote all of the worst SEO tactics.
The funny thing is…
by the time you put all of the time , energy and effort into such black hat strategies…
you could build a website, with good content and staying power that you can be proud of.
frank
SEO contests may be profitable for their initiators. They could have contest rules that request to all participants to put a link to organizer’ website. In this way the organizer make a lot of IBLs at a fairly low price (i.e. the contest prize amount)…