Promoting a SEO contest

Recently I've signed with a big client for a very interesting plan for search engine optimization for their site. The project is nothing more than a SEO contest which will actually be used in a way that the client will get the maximum SEO exposure.

The interesting part is that the prize will be $10.000 (yeah right, ten thousand dollars!) and I am very happy for this because this will for sure bring some exposure to webdigity as well :)

I thought to share this little "secret" with our loyal members, because I want to hear your thoughts on this. I can't tell much for the contest right now, but in the next week we will start a pre release period where contestants will be able to submit their entry (the contest will be available for a limited amount of people)

How would you promote such an event? I have many ideas - plans, but it would be great to know how my webdigity fellas see this.

http://www.timnash.co.uk/10/2007/competitions-dont-always-mean-prizes/ :) timely advice for you

lol I'm happy if I knew enough to win the contest :D

Tim, I've read your post before, and it has some good stuff :)

The only thing I don't get is why you advice to use a separate domain for the contest? In this case I think it is better to host it on a landing page here at webdigity, in order to give more exposure to the site.

Olaf, I think you are pretty good in seo. We don't know yet who is going to enter the contest but I am sure you have your chances ;)

Thanks Nick, I hope I have the time ;)

but believe me I will shoot with everything I have (I hope the subject is related to my websites) :)

Interesting, and daunting as I'm no good as SEO, so I'm obviously out.

The reason for the 2nd domain is to stop the inevitable Google slap ;)
many of the big competitions recently have resulted in very odd results normally in the form of mysterious name droppings, to prevent this effecting the business the third domain is used to get people to point their links at so if something goes wrong it doesn't hit your clients site or webdigity.

Once its over you simply check that all is ok and 301 the domain ;)

Thats a nice prize! Maybe webdigity should create a team to act as one contestant. With all the SEO knowledge and websites our members have combined I think there is a pretty good chance of winning. And what would be better a loose shot at $10,000 or a sure shot at maybe $1000 ... ;)

great idea Nico!

Yeah, that is a great idea Nico, but I'll have to discuss it with the client. The way we develop our application right now this probably wont be possible but will see.

If I understand Nico well we can all register as one person for the prize and put our collective knowledge to win the prize ...
I certainly trust Nick and all other people in this thread to award me my share of the deal (if we win) ... but maybe if Nick is the moderator of the project he should not participate ... otherwise it would look fishy to the outsiders ...

I am in if you guys arrange it ...

Usually competition moderators can't compete, but since this will be a SEO contest I don't think its a problem. I assume the winner will be determined by who has the number one  spot in the search engines on a given date for a particular search phrase. Since there is no way that anyone can bent the search engine results in their favor (short of maybe some Google staff) I don't see a problem here when Nikolas joins the competition, but we'll have to await the official rules.

I agree it might look bad with the client if Nick participates.

I have heard that many of the big SEO contests are won by groups acting as a single contestant. I'd love to get in on the WebDigity Team if we pursue this as a group.

yep Nick you can't join this kind of group because of your client, Michele is right :)

(But I'm sure the winner will donate a few $ to webdigity)

Of course I am not going to enter the contest as I am the person who will develop the whole contest application, plus my "contest" is to promote this event so even if I could, I wouldn't have the time.

I will have to talk with the rest of the contest team if we can accept groups in the contest. Having a first thought on this, I think that this wont be too fair for the rest people who enter the contest. On the other hand we could make the contest a group project by default, so for instance each contestant will have to work in a team of 4 or 5 persons which will cut the earnings.

I'll tell you more on this when I meet with the rest of the team.

count me in as well! if this pushes thru, this would be my first time to join such a contest.

How will you prevent teams from entering? A single person could register and then get help from his friends without telling you. If he wins he just sends each of his friends a fair share.

here in my country, thats how it always goes, a group effort.

In another of these contests, an acquaintance on another forum asked all of us to provide him links on our sites and forum signatures (I might have even had one here for a while - I can't remember); while that doesn't raise to the level of a team, he did mention that most of the other people who were ahead of him in the results were using several people's networks of sites to aid their entries. Many of us who helped him did so because he was trying to make a go of it alone.

My point being, with that much money in play you are going to attract teams; it might be more fair in the long run to set it up that way. Then you won't have the honest folks who do work alone having to combat against those who don't and hope the contest holder/you won't figure out what they are doing.

is there a rule against group effort with such contests?

I've heard some do make it a rule; others I suspect hadn't considered it might happen when they wrote up the rules.

If we don't allow teams to enter then we can know if a team is using the contest as we can log each login to the system. So if a contestant is logging in through 3 different countries every day we can be sure that something is going on ;)

Also I wonder how we can choose teams. I mean most people will have to enter a team randomly, but this wont be fair for most of the contestants....

What do you mean Nick ? what teams ? there is only one team here at webdigity !! are you saying there is a need to have more than one team ?

In case that we allow teams to enter, we should allow any team. The contest should be fair for everyone who enters :)

Nikolas, the people who were cheating and working together had one person managing the project - so only one person logging into the account and that person simply coordinated the efforts of all the other members of the team.

Just because the same person is logging in does not mean they are indeed working alone.

$10,000 is a lot of money - it will bring out people who are much more sneaky and dishonest than we are. You're gonna have to think a bit like them to help ensure that you keep the contest clean.

Allowing teams won't prohibit a group from claiming they have 5 people and really having 50. It might make it a more of challenge and limit the cheating if you put some really serious rules in place, say no more than xxx links to the entry or something that would make quality more important then quantity.

From the little I've seen of these contests it seems whoever can get the most backlinks wins - not much a test of SEO rather than networking.

Michele is right, with this amount of money you get all the black hat seo's on your neck :)

yeah. with their blog farms, bots, etc...

yeah that becomes fun :)

maybe Nick should reduce the price to $100 and spend the rest for our trip to the wonderful country Greece :D

that wont work for me since im too far away.

yeah I thought about that, but there are always people without a price lol

Moderators only then ;D

Let me know when we are leaving Olaf!

yeah maybe we can take a flight together :)

LOL, that would be great, but I think the sponsors wont like the idea :P

BTW I should have released the contest till now (I mean the prerelease part) but with all these ideas, I think I have to reconsider a few things.

Michelle, your arguments are correct, so I guess we will have to allow teams. Maybe teams of 5 persons and for those who don't have team members they will be able to participate alone, or join another team (that will be an administration nightmare for me :) )

In that case the prize will be won by the #1 team.

he he he... hmp!

you can rank both group and single cotestants

Ranking both group and single wound be unfair. 1 person against 5 would be really hard.

Maybe we can leave that to the users in the end. So you will be able to enter as a team of 5 persons, or as single, or a single who wants to join a random team.

How that sounds?

I mean that you rank both groups and singles of course it would be unfair, will say youn need a winner for both categories.

If you do so you need to pay the winner a different way like $x for a number of points (counted links what ever)

I don't think that one price is very good, you need to split the money

One problem is that we need something that is easy to understand. I am not sure we need different categories (teams and singles)

and maybe it would be better to have two prizes. I said one because I don't think splitting $5000 to 5 persons is cool enough.

Arghh, this decision is getting harder every day :)

I think having 2 or 3 prizes is the way to go because people feel that if they are not good enough they can at least try for the third place but if they know that they are up against a very strong team they might not even try ...

1st 6000
2nd 3000
3rd 1000

would be good if i was any good at seo, however i have seen a contest for $100,000 imagine winning that!

We have 6 SEO sites to run and don't have time for a contest. But I will be following this and maybe writing about it on my blogs. This should be interesting.