I joined the Bayanihan SEO Contest which has been ongoing since October 2007. I joined because I wanted to explore the field of SEO. We are already on the 2nd checkpoint, but I would like to share first my experience during the 1st checkpoint.
The keyword for the contest is Paradise Philippines. I prepared 3 websites for this contest, 1 domain site and 2 blogspot subdomains, and applied on them everything I learned in SEO; wrote interesting articles as much as i can (trying hard to be a writer), exchanged links with several bloggers, and looked for themes to match the site’s content. Paradisephilippines.ph was getting good results at first while the other 2 subdomains didn’t rank well. But still, I was so inspired with paradisephilippines.ph that I changed the theme to Mimbo magazine style. But after several weeks, my site disappeared in Google. I really don’t know why it happened, I assumed it was because my chosen theme was not search engine friendly, so I switched back to the old theme. But it did not help. So I gave up and waited until the checkpoint ended. The first checkpoint results were announced last Dec 7. As expected, I was not included in the top 10 Overall Leaderboard.
Now we are on the 2nd checkpoint, but we are using Alibata as the new contest keyword. SEO contests don’t usually change keywords in the middle of the contest. That’s why a lot were disappointed, me included. But we still joined anyway. I’ll still be using paradisephilippines.ph and the other 2 blogspot subdomains for this contest, plus another domain, angalibata.com. Let’s see how my sites will rank on the 2nd checkpoint.
