I’m a Contest Troll
I’ll respond in more detail to some of the whining that’s taking place over the SEO contest when I get back from vacation. (By the way, the cash prize for 1st place is now up to $3000.00 thanks to our good buddy Mike Grehan)
Until then, here’s a great read. I’m a contest troll . 
Another SEO Contest
I’m sure most of you remember Search Guild’s SEO contest from a couple of years ago.
(Search Guild members were given a phrase that produced no results in Google "and the person who ranked #1 after a month won a prize).
It turns out that someone from V7N has decided it would be good for the SEO community if the contest was brought back. Only this time, instead of giving away an ipod, he’s going to give away cold hard cash. ($1000.00 for #1)
But of course, there’s a catch. In order to qualify for the cash, you need to put up a link to V7N.
Now, I think it would be great if all SEO’s would participate. (The last contest only generated about 200k pages). But I also think it is pretty lame to use a contest like this just to build links to your own site. And I also know that there are a lot of great SEO’s who might consider participating, but they aren’t interested in helping V7N out.
So I’ve decided the best thing to do would be to match the offer. I’ll pay the same amount for top 5 positions as V7N. The only requirements to collect the cash will be:
A) Not linking to V7N
and
B) Posting a link to Matt’s blog without using the www. (the non-www version of Matt’s blog is only a PR4, so it needs a little help)
I think this plan will greatly benefit the SEO community by getting far more people to participate. And at the same time, we’ll be able to help out a good friend.
I’ll let everyone know as soon as the keyword phrase has been chosen.
Blog Spamming Part 2
In my last post, I showed an example of what I thought was an attempt at competitive sabotage. Within a minute of clicking the publish button, I received a good example of real comment spam, so I thought I’d post it so everyone can see the difference.
Name : Press Release
E-mail: ip_fresh@yahoo.com
URL: http://www.media-press-release.com
IP: 86.105.70.148 , dyn-86.105.70.148.cj.upcnet.ro
Comment: When the Zawodny v. Cutts debate broke, we decided to go with the link condom, and then I posted about our decision on the company blog.
Arizona Web Design Company Blog Spamming?
Posted by Greg on December 22nd, 2005Last week I received the following comment spam plugging an Arizona web design and SEO firm called MCP Media:
Name: Shannon Light
E-mail: marketing@mcpmedia.com
URL: http://www.mcpmedia.com/search-optimization/SEO.php
IP: 202.134.119.9 (Hong Kong proxy)
Comment: MCP Media is a professional Phoenix web design company. Get free web design quotes here any time!
New Browser App
Posted by Greg on December 21st, 2005OK, so you want to get banned from WebmasterWorld too?
Here’s the browser tool I used to get banned. Just fire it up and selected Googlbot as your UA and start surfing. By this time tomorrw, you should get the Linux death screen.
(You can read more about what it does on the download page)