Wow, I can’t believe it. After giving up on the second checkpoint, I still ranked #6 in the Bayanihan SEO Contest. To an SEO newbie like me, this is already an achievement.
Tag: bayanihan seo
Joining UKWW SEOContest2008
The 1st SEO World Champ, Benj Arriola, announced on SEO.ph forum that he will join the UKWW SEO Contest, together with other SEO gurus Major, Gio, Eli, and Mann3r. The keyword for the said contest is SEOContest2008 (without spaces). At first I was not interested to join, after what happened to my sites in the recently held Bayanihan SEO Contest. So I don’t think I’m ready for another one. But as I was reading the thread, I was inspired by Benj’s goal:
Basta objective ko dapat buong 1st page ng contest na yun pinoy lahat at walang taga country nila.
He wants Filipinos to conquer the 1st page of Google. He bought almost all seocontest2008 domains and gave them away for free to fellow Filipino SEO gurus to be used in the contest.These SEO gurus also tried to share their SEO tactics discreetly to SEO newbies. Because of this, I decided to join too! My official contest entry for the UKWW SEO Contest is seocontest2008contest.i.ph.
Giving up on 2nd checkpoint, Bayanihan SEO
Since the start of Bayanihan SEO, I have been too aggressive in asking for links from sites with high PR, giving my site 3000+ incoming links. But I found out on SEO.ph forum that the number of incoming links should be proportional to the age of the website. So this means, what I have been doing the whole time, was wrong. Google noticed the sudden increase of incoming links, resulting to Google’s -950 penalty. I think this is the reason why my sites suddenly disappeared in Google search results during the first checkpoint. I can’t do anything about this anymore, its almost end of 2nd checkpoint.
Joining the Bayanihan SEO Contest
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.