Anil Wins the Nigritude Ultramarine Contest

I was happy to see that Anil Dash won the second round of the SEO ‘nigritude ultramarine’ Google challenge. For some reason Goolge’s love affair with weblogs still fascinates me. It trips me out how easily my posts, especially on my other blog, can rise to the top 5 results on Google. So when I saw that Anil entered the contest I was more than happy to throw up a link to him. I love the that one simple blog post beat out all of the ‘link spammers’:

Dash’s strategy differed greatly from that of the first-round winner, named a month ago, who claimed his victory through the use of backlinking, a technique in which the required words on other people’s sites were hyperlinked back to his site.

In contrast, Dash became the overall winner by virtue of a single post on his blog in which he asked his readers to link from their own sites. Countless numbers did and — after his very late entry assumed the top Google spot shortly after the competition’s first round ended — Dash was never seriously challenged.

“The impetus (was) for me, on a fluke, to say, ‘Hey, I don’t want these guys who do link spamming to win the contest,'” said Dash. “I figured that people would be fighting the contest the whole month and coming up with new and innovative ways to get their page ranking up, but it didn’t happen.”

Indeed, according to Brandon Suit, the first-round winner, Dash’s victory was a fait accompli from the moment he entered the competition. No amount of search engine optimization expertise or technique, Suit said, could match the page-ranking strength of Dash’s popular blog, which discusses technology and blogging, and the sheer number of readers who agreed to link to his contest entry.

Suit said he conceded to Dash a month ago, paraphrasing a consolation message he got from a friend, “Anil’s entry into this contest (was) like a NASCAR driver entering a Go-Kart race.”

So now I just have one question for Anil — When do we get to watch our flat screen TV?