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Globalwarming Awareness2007

Top 15 SEO lessons Learned from the Globalwarming Awareness2007 SEO Contest

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  1. Meta Descriptions do make a difference. Having an exact match in your Meta Description does increase your positioning if you have the equivalent Page Rank of a competitor.
  2. Page Titles are one of the most important on page factors. The Title for 90% of top ten competitors for all major search engines was "globalwarming awareness2007" Tight and focused.
  3. MSN shows backlinks before other major search engines show theirs then Yahoo site explorer shows second while it can take months for Google to show even a percentage of overall links. MSN is also based on a nueral network and relies much less on the backlink structure.
  4. Google is a much more stable search engine and takes authority backlinks into consideration more than relevance or on page SEO. Yahoo and MSN fluctuate much more than Google. In MSN we started at position 1, and fluctuated between 10-80 and have moved back up in the past couple of weeks. In Google, we moved from 100+ to upper 70's and slowly to the mid 50's.
  5. The Quantity of backlinks is as important as the quality of backlinks. The top 10 positions in Google go to sites with backlinks ranging from 5000 to 37,000.
  6. Social News Sites can help you gain quick but temporary positioning.
  7. Exact Matching in the domain name will help you gain positioning as long as you have the backlinks to support the authority of the site.
  8. Search engines (especially Yahoo) will categorize your site into a specific industry and will relate your industry credibility to your ability to rank for the more competitive keywords within that industry.
  9. Most SEO analyst have multiple puppet accounts at most search news and media websites such as Digg and Reddit to give an article an initial “kickoff”.
  10. After the end of the “Isulong SEOPH” and “Ituloy AngSulong” seo contests, entries from seo webmasters based in the Phillpines were able to re-direct their backlinks. This greatly increased their relevance of links to their SEO world championship contest entry and pushed their rankings up overall. So much so that relevance of incoming links were able to overcome quantity but not quality. At the time of this writing, non-relevant links with PR7 and PR8 were able to surmount lower page ranked relevant links.
  11. Obscure Meta Tags were utilized but then removed as they did not make a noticeable difference. These included the meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"> tag.
  12. Duplicate content was blocked through the use of robots.txt files and 301 redirecting the non-www. to the www. domain which seemed to help.
  13. High PR alone compensated for breaking the theme related threshold and flow Google juice through.
  14. As the contest progressed, there was a tightening of the category. Entries that ranked well were more focused on the fact that this was about a contest – not about global warming specifically.
  15. And the top SEO Lessons learned from the Globalwarming Awareness2007 SEO contest is... The Backlink is the new King!

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Official SEO Contest Rules

1. Site must include either a SEO World Championship text link or a banner. (The banner may be linked or not linked)
2. Valid contact information must be found on the site, E-mail is preferred.
3. Your official domain must be registered the same day or after January the 15th 2007. (All domains registered before the 15th of January 2007 will not qualify for the competition, no record of the domain is allowed. See archive.org)
4. Website will not use SEO methods which are clearly not approved by Search Engine Guidelines for example: doorway pages, etc. See Google webmaster Guidelines. (Any participant ignoring the Google webmaster guidelines will not qualify for a prize)

How the winners will be selected

On May 1st, 2007 we will make a search for "the keyword" on Google.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com and combine the scores and subsequently determine a winner. The score is calculated by giving points to position 1 - 10 in each search engine. You will receive 10 points for a number one spot, and 1 point for a number 10 spot.

For example:
Your website: www.yourdomain.com
Rank in Google: 7 = 4 points
Rank in MSN: 10 = 1 point
Rank in Yahoo: 2 = 9 points
Total points for www.yourdomain.com = 14 points

If 2 contestants would end up with the same Total points then the contestant with the highest rank in Google.com will take the higher position. You can follow the the total points of this contest on our scorecard page.

Official Results