As a webmaster you probably already know what a SEO Contest is or you surely came across some of them or even participated in. Some of the major SEO contests organized are the v7ndotcom elursrebmem (by v7n.com), Ambachdotcom, Carcasherdotcom, and more recently the Cpayscom2 Online Casino where the winner gets $10,000 for ranking number one on MSN. Now the big question is whether it is good or bad to organize SEO Contests.
Let's start with the organizer of the SEO Contest. For the website organizing the competition, it is surely a good thing in terms of marketing as the SEO contest will bring thousands of backlinks in much shorter time that it would take if link building was done normally, that is, directory submissions, article submissions and so on. On the bad side, the website will mostly get tons of unrelated links as many of the website participating don't know much about the main theme of contest, let's say the website organizing the competition is about acne and most of the participating website are talking about SEO, these are definitely non related links they will get.
Let's now come to the participant. For him participating in a SEO contest can do only good since he will try his best to rank for a keyword that has 0 competitions. So in short it is a good way to test his SEO skills and also learning new techniques and improve himself.
When organizing a SEO contest for sure the whole webmaster world knows about it, and thousands of webmasters will participate in the competition resulting in millions of pages created in a short time. Do search engines see this as spamming? Nobody knows… But I personally think that after a competition the participating websites should be deleted since many of them will not be of any value on the web. For example a website talking about SEO to rank for the keyword “acne” related stuffs is completely useless don't you think?
To sum up, SEO Contests are both good and bad. But I think it will be a good idea to remove participating websites from the web once the contest is over. Many people may not share the same view but we should also think about the average internet users as not everybody online are webmasters.
