Nigritude Ultramarine: What We Will Learn

Excerpt from a very nice article Nigritude Ultramarine: What We Will Learn by Mark Daoust of Site-Reference. (I apologize to Mark in advance for plagerizing part of his article)

Recently DarkBlue.com initiated a competition to see who could rank #1 for the keyword nigritude ultramarine. The idea of the competition is to see what works and what does not work in search engine optimization of websites. To aid in creating useful findings, the competition has two winners. The first winner will be announced in early June and the second winner will be announced in July. The idea is to see who can get to the #1 position in a short amount of time as well as to see who can optimize the best for the long term.



But what will we really learn from Nigritude Ultramarine? Will there be a great epiphany among SEO experts which show us how to obtain that coveted #1 ranking with Google?



Although the nigritude ultramarine competition is good in theory, it has inherent flaws. Unfortunately these flaws are big enough to discredit any findings from the entire competition.



Spam is the Answer?

I must admit that when this contest first started, I thought it would be interesting and we may learn a lot from it. How wrong could I ever be?



We are witnessing children in the Wiki Sandboxes, and second-rate hacks lifting pages from the Google Cache and claiming them as their own -- and if that was not enough, the thief had the nerve to tell his victims to use the NOARCHIVE robot directive to prevent it from happening.



Now there is a late-comer to the game, a blogger of no SEO training or background who amassed something short of a miracle in the last hours of the contest and is now at the top of the pack. All of this was done in the blink of an eye for he is very popular on the blog scene and he may remain there for the duration.



He is already getting the jeers from the spammers currently in the top of the pack in his comment boxes, basicly telling him that he is not an expert and he using the influence of his blog mates to unfair advantage. Talk about poor sports, eh? What is good for the goose is good for the gander in my book, and this guy has every right to ride the Ultramarine tide. If I remember the rules right ... there are no rules. At least he has a pleasant site to look at when you actually visit it, and there is something worth reading rather than Nigritude Ultramarine written a hundred times across your pages.



Good luck Anil !!!



And cheers to Tom Coates:

I just thought I should add that I think Anil should post some other links through to the other articles about this SEO stuff - particularly the ones that told us to be aware of the liklihood of an influx of wiki spam links because of this contest. I think once you have this floor, it's worth using it to educate SEO people about the damage they have on the web community at large.