SEOContest2008

1. First of all is, I would like to thank everyone I solicited help in my SEO efforts for this contest.
2. And I guess I have to even thank even more those that voluntarily help without even me asking.
3. And I thank even a lot more those that asked me how they can help before they actually did help me.

Now that I have enumerated these 3 groups… I would like to point out number 2.

For those that gave me sitewide links near the last minute… some people have different thoughts on this, but with my thoughts, a sitewide link is too fast of a link building technique considering the near closing of this contest. I personally fear the sitewide link when the contest is near it’s ending because I have this belief that the link building will be to fast and may trigger some delay filter. An editorial link still in my opinion works best.

Next is, in the last few weeks, I have see people giving me 301s that I believe were not present before. Although I appreciate your concern in helping out, please be aware that this is a no-301 rule contest. Aside from that, adding your 301s in this last few days is not that effective since it was added at the last minute. I am not fully aware of everyone who did this, but two people I clearly have seen doing this is…

G. Ortiz and M. Rogers

As for Ms. Ortiz, I have spoken with her after one of the people on UK Webmaster World asked me about one site. I saw what you did. I appreciate the help. And thank you for taking off the 301 you added at the last minute.

Now for Mr. Rogers, well what can I say. I never had any plans of talking to you which I believe you already know. And whatever you are doing, which I am not really sure, if you are helping or putting me into disaster. I have seen your site a few weeks back (thanks Eli for telling me about this 301) and it barely had content and now you change it to a 301. Please remove it. It was added too near the end and it will barely help too. Thanks but no thanks.

UPDATE: I posted this at the spur of the moment and was not quite sure how the tone of my blog post is. I did not wish to offend anyone and did not mean I do not appreciate your help. What I meant was simply stick to editorial post. A blog story with a link will do. And no 301s please, it’s too late in the contest day anyway. Same with sitewide links, just stick with editorial links. That’s all. Again thank you and I very much appreciate your concern.

SEOContest2008-Sphere.com has been trading places with me for the number 1 and 2 spots. It has been like a daily unstableness. In the previous SEO contest I have joined, I usually do nothing in the last few days of the contest. Mainly because if you over do it, there is also such a thing as over optimize, that may affect your ranking even more. In the SEO World Championship, in the last two weeks I literally did nothing myself and the results seemed to be more stable then. But for this contest, results change like on a daily basis, where sometimes I am number 1, sometimes I am number 2.

Team SEOSphere is not Stopping

As much as I want to stop to avoid any sudden drops, the SEOContest2008-Sphere.com team seems to keep going on. And it seems like their work is paying off. And whatever I start doing now, may not be enough to stay back at the number 1 spot. Aside from that, doing it too much too fast can drop me down as well. In fact sometimes I do not like changing my site that much when I am already ranking high. But in this case, I saw the need to.

Wild Ride on SEOContest2008!

James kept me on my toes with only 3 days left, I know I can’t do anything about it. My friend from 55 Brownlow Ave. would sure be happy knowing that I am jittered. I have this book I need to photocopy. And I’ve heard that you have a great Xerox machine over there that can do 10,000 copies per minute. I’m losing hope, thanks for giving me some consolation knowing that you are the champ.

Yup, after checking several data centers after Ed sent me an IM and told me he’s been seeing me at number 2 on some DCs. I decided to check it myself and it has been inconsistent as some show me at #1, some show me at #2 on Google. With 1 week left, it is still anybody’s game. (more…)

Just earlier, a few hours ago, although I was not able to replicate this, the 72.*.*.* IP block of Google datacenters was briefly showing seocontest2008.uk.com as number 1. And it seems spreaded among this block showing mixed results with either me or seocontest2008-sphere.com or seocontest2008.org interchanging 2nd, 3rd and 4th places.

But after a 30 minutes of checking, I could no longer replicate the results I was seeing except for one datacenter I visit having seocontest2008.uk.com as number 1. But I also noticed most of the cache dates seemed to roll back to March 1, 2008 even if a few days ago many results were having the March 4, 2008 cache date. (more…)

The whole point of having these problems started when I moved this SEOContest2008 website to a separate hosting account that used to be parked on top of SEOReligion.com with redirected pages. I lost several pages indexed as well as the benefit of several backlinks that prompted me to fix my site on March 2 to avoid any contest compliance rule conflicts later on and get the Search Engines to see my changes as early as possible so I still have appropriate time to get re-indexed. (more…)

Now I kept my DNS the same to avoid any sudden ranking changes but I made the nameservers resolve on a new IP separate from SEOReligion. Right now I know some will see the www.seocontest2008.com to be either server not found, some configuration problem with a cPanel error page, error 404 or still the old site. I’m expecting this site to be fully resolved within the next 24 to 48 hours.

SEOContest2008 Solution to Problem 6

Not much solutions. This is simply a time factor where ISPs should be refreshing their cache. So all we have to do is wait.

This site has several indexed pages when it was still parked on SEOReligion.com. Now the pages no longer exist. And when Google sees this, such a massive change may trigger some red flags thinking the site no longer exist or is owned by someone else and resets the ranking. We do not want that to happen. (more…)

Come to think of it… search engines do not know what seocontest2008 meant in the beginning of this 2008 SEO contest. Which is the reason why there were zero results, and there were no related results too. Google like other search engines, really do not know the meaning of words and they simply “learn” in a way using semantics. Maybe many of you have heard of LSI already or Latent Semantic Indexing and Google did not buy the company Applied Semantics for nothing a few years back. As we continue and progress with this SEO contest and more and more websites are using the keyword: SEOContest2008, and Google will get a better meaning of this keyword in relation to the other words it commonly co-exists within a page and see how the word is used in relation to other words. Taking note of flow patterns and hierarchical structure as well. (more…)

The topbar navigation is based of another site, SEOReligion. Now since we are having this as a separate site, the top bar navigation makes no sense and gives deadlinks. Solution is simple, delete the topbar navigation.

Not everything on a fresh install of Wordpress is exactly what I want to have in SEOContest2008. Some settings are not ideal and you might want to check out my list and copy what I do and probably help you out in your ranking too. (more…)