A Contest to Outwit Google

The owner of an online forum won the first round of a worldwide search-engine optimization competition Monday, by using a backlinking strategy that scored his site as the top Google result for a made-up term, "nigritude ultramarine."

By Daniel Terdiman

http://wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,63755,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

The contest, called the SEO Challenge http://www.darkblue.com/seochallenge/ , tasked webmasters and site owners with using any optimization method to try to claim the top spot on Google for the odd term http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22nigritude+ultramarine%22 , which loosely means "dark blue" in Latin. DarkBlue http://www.darkblue.com , an Australian affiliate-marketing company, and SearchGuild.com http://www.searchguild.com were the sponsors of the competition.

"SearchGuild exists for two reasons: to understand search engine ranking and to have fun," said Chris Ridings, SearchGuild.com’s owner. "The competition is essentially for the same reasons, which is why we wanted to do it. It’s very easy for somebody to say, ‘This ranking technique works because I say so.’ The competition provides a stage for them to actually demonstrate how strong particular ranking techniques really are. In essence, you can’t bluff the competition — you’re either first or you’re not."

These days, many site owners believe placement in Google’s rankings is an all-important factor in a business’ success or failure. But Google frequently changes the way it ranks sites, partly as a way of fending off those who game the system with new search engine optimization tricks. And some believe that Google, while being the undisputed search leader, does not always return the most relevant results.

"The competition really gives the opportunity to stand back and say this is what one engine does badly and another does better," Ridings said. "Nobody’s ever really had that so clearly before."

Since the SEO Challenge began May 7, more than 1,000 site owners and webmasters have built hundreds of thousands of Web pages using "nigritude ultramarine" in just about every imaginable manner.

Brandon Suit, whose online community was judged the first-round winner, said that his success was based largely on backlinks — a technique in which the required words on other people’s sites are hyperlinked back to Suit’s site.

"I had a professional (search-engine optimizer) who had contacted me, and he said he would help me," Suit said. "I feel that his help, along with others, was the main reason for our win. It’s all about quality backlinks"

Philipp Lenssen, who writes a blog http://blog.outer-court.com/ about Google, just missed winning the first round. He used a combination of three optimization methods, but according to Ridings, Lenssen’s entry slipped into the second spot just at the moment of judging.

Lenssen said his main strategy, too, was building a tremendous number of backlinks.

"I asked readers of my blog to link to me using ‘nigritude ultramarine’ as link text," said Lenssen. "I also have several sites under my control. They are template-driven, so it’s easy for me to create, say, a backlink on 60,000 pages in five minutes of my time."

In the end, SEO Challenge entrants were allowed to do anything to win, even things that some might consider underhanded.

"If the point of the competition is to prove which methods work and don’t work, then it’s silly to place rules that say you can’t use such and such a technique," Ridings said. "If they really can’t use it then the assumption is that Google would boot them out of the index, so they wouldn’t win."