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> The Great nigritude ultramarine Massacree!
The story on this page describes a contest in
progress as we wrote - the contest ended July 7th - more writing on this followed,
found in the menu to the right...
The Great nigritude ultramarine Massacree!
May 2004. If you run a search
in Google for the phrase "nigritude ultramarine" you'll see some
of the top guns in the murky world of search engine optimization (SEO), locked
in battle for first position in the results page.
A contest is in progress - it's the SEO Challenge issued by an affiliate network
to the entire SEO community around the world. The goal is to get your web site
at position number One in Google on June 7th, with another prize offered to the
site at that position on July 7th, the collateral challenge being to see if the
first winner can hold position for a month against all comers.
If this interests you, a wealth of SEO technique is being discussed and displayed.
This is the practice of gaming the engines, and page optimization is a minimal
factor compared with the mass of inbound links it takes to boost a site nowadays
in Google.
Webmasters all over the world are watching the event, studying the ways in which
various players have risen through the rankings, also noting various deployments
made purely to test Google's ever changing algorithm. There's vastly more backroom
communication going on than is breaking surface, alliances are being made, traffic
is being sloshed around the Web on command. And of course, Google is watching
all this very closely too.
This is a stellar opportunity for SEO companies to prove themselves in the market,
but a discussion forum (or weblog) may take the prize. At this writing (May 30,
2004), a discussion forum had taken over top position, and the thread we show
below is the very thread in which members gradually agree to push for the prize
and combine resources. Other forums figure prominently in this race for the same
reason, and the threads are fascinating reading as a kind of living history of
the industry in motion.
- To follow the story with a minimum of bewilderment, try Danny Sullivan's
introduction: searchenginewatch
- Here's the more technical, detailed Nigritude
Ultramarine FAQ
- and for the official progress report: DarkBlue's
Challenge
- Garrett French describes how the contest turned nasty, gaming the situation
with a ploy exploiting what many feel to be a vulnerability in Google: WebProNews
- The same ploy is discussed by some of the principals also here: digitalpoint
- Enjoy the official discussion thread that originally announced the target
search term, and more than 30 pages later contains a number of posts from some
of the front-runners: searchguild
- There are quite a few forums worth reading on search engine matters, this
one is one of the best, also a communal entrant in the contest - read about it
here: devshed
- seochat
- The current top position goes to the merkey forum, with posts from many of
the same players: nigritude
ultramarine
Be warned that you may spend countless hours exploring
this story!
-source: hunter and associates
ps...We just can't leave this one alone. We may write
a follow-up story of how things shake out by the next UPDATE of the Web Market
Snapshots. Meanwhile we're going to put a link here to the current position #3,
we've been rooting for this guy in the UK, he was position #1 for the longest
time it seems like, and then the forum displaced him. Currently climbing fast
is a Weblog at #2, hard to beat those things for link propagation, it may take
the top by the finish.
We took a screen capture of Google on June 1st, wish we'd done it at
earlier stages, but it's a PDF you can look at if you want, it shows the forum
merkey at 1, the weblog at 2, and sim64 the Brit at 3. File is here.
Here's the link to sim64, it's pure essence of nigritude
ultramarine...
We're also going to give a link to the site that got kicked down the
ladder by the devious ploy we mentioned above in the Garrett French and Digitalpoint
links. This well connected site in New Zealand was doing so well until the massacree
hit - this man got knocked down from position 3 to position 103 in a New Zealand
second - so beware the penalties of Google, and hope you never have savvy competition
with more programming skills than kindness. When dining in Auckland, be sure to
try the Nigritude
Ultramarine from Michael Brandon's menu.
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Massacree!
