Search Engine Optimization Contests
Webmasters from all over sometimes compete in search engine optimization (SEO) contests. A given keyword or keyword combination will be given by Google and many will battle it out to be the best rank. A SEO contest encourages webmasters to trick search engines. Some are willing to resort to spam, while others provide quality content covering the competition or even optimizing page titles. Usually the keywords are a bunch of nonsense that does not mean anything. This is a very good chance for webmasters to endorse their websites gain web traffic. Besides that, the contenders battle it out for prizes and big bragging rights while the organizing committee often benefits as well.
Here are a couple of common factors of the SEO contests
•   The contests usually focus on Google. For one, Google is a difficult search engine to get a good rank, particularly for new websites.
•   Typically SEO contests require participants to optimize a single webpage for a fictional phrase of two silly words. The reason why this is done is to make sure that some websites do not get an advantage and regular internet users to have a smooth usage of the search engine.
•   Blogs seem to do well especially when it comes down to new fresh information on a temporary basis.
The first known contest was the nigritude ultramarine competition, started on May 7, 2004. The contest was won by a man named Anil Dash, two months later. In this contest there were about two hundred competitors. The competitive conditions were demanding, as many contestants use illegal black hat techniques to gain recognition. Although Anil Dash won the competition, another competitor who wrote nigritude ultramarine FAQ won the Judges Choice award due to the fact that it is a valuable source of information about the competition. This web page was placed sixth in the overall standings.
Many Black hat methods involved in the nigritude ultramarine competition includes:
•   False Spam reports- A common technique where contestants try to get search engines to penalize the competitors’ page by filing false spam complains
•   Google Bombing- This method distorts the Google search results for target keywords
•   Parasitic link farms- A parasitic link farm is a big website containing thousands of inter-linked pages.
•   Page count inflation- This is done by adding a huge sum of other pages to the same domain.
•   Guestbook spamming- A guestbook spammer is someone who goes to many Guestbooks just to create multiple links back to their site to boost its position in the page rank system
•   Blog spamming- Similar to guestbook spamming
•   Forum spamming- Similar to guestbook spamming
The first Google SEO contest was seraphim proudleduck. There were over 520000 participants for this competition. Now, only about 84600 seraphim proudleduck URLS exist.
Over time, new special rules and limitations are added to make the competition more challenging. For example, in January 2006, the Redscowl Bluesingsky contest was only opened to web pages with new domains only.
One thing is for sure more SEO Contest will showcase fun and excitement in SEO.