Many of you may have seen this seo “competition” started by REW. I’m officially dropping out. It was short lived.
I’m just really sick of people giving me a hard time and claiming that I’m using spamming to get the results I’m getting.
One of my so called “spam” techniques was to include the keyword: “greatest real estate agent in the world” in some anchor text on comments I left at a few blogs. I immediately got an ear full from other commenters that I was spamming. But the ironic thing is that 24 hours later, I started seeing about 10 other competitors doing the exact same thing. It just cracks me up… I even saw 2 people in particular that did it after telling me it was spam!
Sometimes these competitions just bring out the worst in people… so, instead of creating a bad name for myself because of people’s misconceptions, I’m simply going to bow out of this one.
I went ahead and removed many of the incoming links to this post, and made significant changes to the page itself… so I assume that my ranking will drop in the next 24 hours. It’s just not worth it to me to tarnish my reputation simply because some people have an extremely loose definition of spam. I have been open and honest about the techniques I use, and the people that know me know that I only use and teach white hat seo. The people that are crying spam and black hat have simply never been exposed to what REAL black hat seo is.
The whole contest is really kind of silly anyway. Once I thought it over, I should have realized the kind of techniques that would be brought out. With such a short time frame, you almost have to use some short term “run and gun” seo in order to get ahead. I highly doubt that we’re going to see any revolutionary new seo methods being used by the participants anyway. One of the purposes of the contest was to share ideas, but I have a really hard time believing that is going to happen. My prediction is that it’s going to turn into a “spam fest” and only lend further to the growing opinion in the real estate blogosphere that all seo is spam. This could have been a really great contest… but I just can’t see it benefiting the real estate community. It is however a great link bait idea (wish I would have thought of it), even if that wasn’t the original intention.
This is what I propose for a future contest:
- Lengthen the time frame (at least 3-6 months). This will weed out the competitors that aren’t serious, and give people time to use some regular long term seo techniques. This will also make it more fair to the website that doesn’t already carry a high trust rank.
- Don’t just choose 1 keyword to compete on, but 5-10. This makes it more realistic if you’re trying to use the contest as a teaching tool for other agents trying to get better rankings.
- Create a more comprehensive rule list. What is, and isn’t allowed?
- Document the success of the leaders on a regular basis (once a month), and reverse engineer their techniques and publish at the end of the contest in order to help other real estate agents learn about real life successful seo techniques.
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