Final SEO Contest Outcome and How #5 Was Achieved In Google
Well, the Blackhat Fish SEO Contest is over. My entry finished at #11 in Google for the search term Blackhat Fish on the day that the contest ended, July 5th. According to the presenters of the contest, the #1 result was disqualified by the contest presenters. You can read their comments here.
Interestingly, just three days after the contest ended, today, my position in Google bounced again. I took a screen shot, just to validate what I am about to tell you. On July 8, 2008, three days after the contest ended, I ranked #5 in Google and the first entry was still a disqualified entry: Click Here to see the screen shot or click the image below.
What People Want To Know: How Did I Do It?
I will step you through the How I Did It:
- On 6-10-08, I made my original Blackhat Fish contest entry on this blog, according to the contest rules. The goal was to rank for the keyword phrase Blackhat Fish.
- On 6-11-08, I wrote my first article to promote the URL of my entry, and I distributed the article through The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service. This first article was titled, “What To Do When Your Website Does Not Rank Well In Google“. Instead of directly targeting the keyword phrase, I opted to mix up the keyword phrases that I used to link to this URL. I do this because Google actually has a penalty that applies to any URL, which has more than 60% of its links coded with the same keyword phrase. This article set the anchor text of the link to: Fishing for Links in Google, and the link was contained in the body of the article.
- On 6-11-08, I set up a link in the left sidebar of The Phantom Writers sales pages, labeled “Recommended Reading: Whitehat Article Marketing Principles”, with its anchor text reading, “Whitehat Article Marketing“. This put the link into about 100 pages of The Phantom Writers website.
- On 6-13-08, I set up contextual links through embedded ads at the website: Articles 4 Reprint. The links to my contest entry only appeared on pages that talked about “SEO”.
- On 6-21-08, I wrote and distributed my second article promoting my contest entry. The article was titled, “SEO Contests Are Gaining Industry Respect“. This article actually targeted the keyword phrase that the contest was designed for us to rank: Blackhat Fish. Once again, the link was in the body of the article.
- On 6-23-08, I set up a few links from the domain Keyword Text, in the Article Marketing Tips section, that linked to the targeted URL with a variety of keyword phrases in the anchor text, but only on pages that already had some Google PageRank, mostly PR2 and PR3 pages. There were about six links added from this domain.
- On 6-24-08, a third article was written and distributed in this campaign. The article was titled, “Blackhat SEO: Protect Yourself by Recognizing The Bad Guys“. This article linked to the contest entry with the anchor text “Blackhat Fish“, this time in the article’s resource box.
- On 6-27-08, a fourth article was written and distributed. This article was titled, “The Mythical Google Sandbox And How To Escape It“. This article carried the link in the body of the article once again, but it set its anchor text to read, “Blackhat Fish SEO Contest entry“.
- On 7-1-08, I added a footer link from the domain Pen Circles and in its subdomains, all linking to the target URL with the anchor text, “Blackhat Fish“. Three of the subdomains have some PageRank.
The contest ended on 7-5-08.
The four articles used in this campaign were published far and wide on the Internet. A lot of these various article placements have been documented at: 11 Days And Counting.
During the course of this 30-day contest, I have bounced frequently between page one and page two results in Google. On 07-05-08, I was #11. Today, my entry is #5. Keep checking back here and click this link to the search results in Google to see where I might be tomorrow.
It was fun, but now it is over.
I hope you have found this insightful and interesting, the same as I have.
Bill Platt - owner of The Phantom Writers Article Distribution and Ghost Writing Services
Related posts:
- Happy 4th of July Everyone
- SEO Contests
- Eleven Days and Counting… Will I Win?
- Tips For Getting Your Own Google Love
- Whitehat vs. Blackhat: Fish For Links or Die Trying
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