v7ndotcom elursrebmem in Wall Street Journal

v7ndotcom elursrebmem in Wall Street Journal

Obviously Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal is in need of about $4,000 because he’s joined the largest SEO ranking contest in history; just kidding. V7n’s v7ndotcom elursrebmem Google ranking competition just received the coverage it needs to bring the world of Search Engine Optimization to the next level as WSJ featured the competition with insight from John Scott and Jim Westengren (who is currently in first place).

Gomes writes that Westengren is keeping within ethical SEO limits : “Mr. Westergren says he will go only as far as using “gray hat” methods, including purchasing links. But he says that being a front-runner makes you a target for the black hatters. They might, for instance, “promote” your site via the sort of spam that Google is known to frown upon. The end result of that, says Mr. Westergren, is that your site could be demoted.”

However, it should be noted that not all sites within the top results are using such safe & cuddly forms of ranking techniques. For example, v7n member Nin10do (aka. King of Da Wackos) has used the questionable technique of spammy cloaking which got BMW booted from Google results the other week. On v7n Forums Nin10do adds “Out of 5,070,000 results, the 7th listing is my hard-core cloaking/spam/keyword stuffing site!!!”

One nice statistic on the competition is that Gomes writes that v7ndotcom elursrebmem has already reached a link “figure exceeded three million links, more than the ones for Junichiro Koizumi, the prime minister of Japan.”

I’m not sure exactly what Gomes meant by links, but there are now, as of today, 2,800,000 results indexed in Google for the v7ndotcom elursrebmem term. Yahoo, which has more accurate ‘public; back link tracking than Google tracks 186,000 links to v7n.com. Gomes or John, would you mind explaining the 3,000,000 links number in the comment field below?

Regardless, what v7n.com has put together is the largest and possibly last major SEO contest, as once the winner is announced will come the contest copycats (this is already happening). The WSJ article has done more than legitimize the contest, as it has already led to Matt Cutts from Google blogging about it, something Mr. Cutts has stayed away from for the past month (and notice that Matt did not mention the keyword).

Come to think of it, on his Internet Marketing Blog John mentioned that Buzz for the contest was dying down a bit and published this Technorati chart on contest mentions:

Looks like today’s WSJ story may pick up that buzz just enough to give V7ndotcom another peak in the buzz box. I talked to John today about the contest and how it has been going to date. “The contest has had its ups and downs. I think we’ve seen some ugliness here and there, but we’ve moved past that and I think that it has brought the SEO community closer than any time in the past.”

John added “The main purpose of the contest was to bring fun-ness to the SEO community and I think it has accomplished that. I hop in moving forward we can do so as a community. Many thanks to Lee Gomes of the WSJ for his interest in the contest and his fair coverage of it.”

Expect more on v7n’s SEO contest this week.