How Competitions Affect SEO Perceptions
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In February 2005, Israeli Internet portal NRG Maariv sponsored a Google Bombing competition. The goal of the competitors was to score as high as possible in the search results of Google Israel for the chosen phrase. While the competition may have had its winners, the clear losers, were professional SEOs. Itai Levitan explains why.
Israel is a very interesting country which is unique in regard to its people’s creative and innovative IT development abilities. Israel is not, however, renowned for its marketing capabilities. This does not come as a surprise since Israeli firms have little experience with international marketing (as opposed to the U.S., for instance, which is considered the marketing leader of the world).
Search Engine Optimization in Israel
Search engine optimization is growing in Israel and in February, one of the largest Israeli portals, NRG Maariv, held a Google Bombing competition: Latoor Motor (in Hebrew: לתור מוטור). The competition invited the search engine optimization community to take the Hebrew translation of the two words “לתור מוטור” and promote any Web content that targets that phrase in order to achieve top rankings among organic search results of Google Israel (http://www.Google.co.il). In search of mass ratings, NRG Maariv was using its homepage and explicitly called for anyone to "fool Google."
Bombing Google in Israel
As noted in Wikipedia, Google bombing competitions are won by sites that use a combination of keyword spamming and, at times, link spamming. Google has publicly commented about Google Bombing in the past, calling it “cyber graffiti.” In my opinion, it didn’t want to give too much attention to the phenomena, hoping to diminish its publicity; but I’m quite sure that the Google engineers are very much against (and possibly afraid of) competitions that mess with their algorithms, increase their transparency, attract potential lawsuits and affect users’ experience of finding and browsing search results.
Getting back to the Google bombing competition going on in Israel till the end of February 2005, the response was pretty impressive among many small-time SEOs and webmasters, many of whom have less than two years of experience in the field and fewer have ongoing hands-on experience in handling real optimization campaigns while professionally servicing real clients. Personally, I was quite disappointed with the approach of this competition, as I oppose the over-rating of any Google bombing competition. I would like to share my opinions and my reasons for this.
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