There is yet another seo contest spoiling the web. Yes, I say spoiling, because that is exactly what they do.
To quickly sum up: a company picks a made up phrase and offers a cash prize to whomever gets and holds the number one spot after a specified length of time.
I’m not going into detail about the current contest because I don’t want anyone to think I endorse it in any way. It’s just the opposite.
These contests make us (search marketers) look bad. The reason is because many of the people competing will use a variety of black hat (unethical) search marketing techniques to win. They will use keyword spam, massive and shady link building… you name it.
To those of us in the industry, we might be able to analyze the results afterwards to see what techniques were used, quickly seeing if anything interesting turned up.
But for those on the outside, they will see a massive abuse of the system in order to get quick cash.
On the heals of the Newsweek article that cast search marketers in an unfair light, those of us in the industry need to do a better job informing everyone exactly what it is we do. [More on the Newsweek article here: SEO Shady? Hardly. ]
To use an earlier analogy, SEO contests make us look like junk bond traders, when we are more like financial investors.
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