Nigritude Ultramarine

[Brian Turner]

In case anyone hasn't noticed, there's an SEO competition running over who can rank highest for the term "Nigritude Ultramarine".

Funny - when I laucnhed SEO Lab I actually considered launching a ranking competition for SEOs. But I didn't, precisely because I didn't think any real SEO's would want to expose all their different methodologies so openly and overtly to search engines.

And this is precisely what the "Nigritude Ultramarine" competition is surely going to do.

It's scary that - for just a couple of trinkets - the SEO industry has been turned so upside down.

The whole competition has simply served as a free consultation exercise in exposing the weaknesses in search engine ranking algorithms.

I really do shudder at the consequences. It can only serve to make search engines clamp down on these and make SEO much much harder to practice.

Although that's possibly a good thing for the SEO industry in general - after all, any clamp downs are bound to affect the hobbyist SEO's first - the idea that Google and co are going to make my life harder (and make the rankings I'm paid to achieve more difficult to achieve) is obviously not something I'm going to welcome.

Then again, it's all part of the SEO vs SE battle and I have no problem keeping up with that. It's just a little disconcerting that, for the promise of a lousy cheap iPod, so many apparent SEOs are scrambling over one another to reveal their full working methods. It's almost like turning over the SEO battle plans - something the search engines will no doubt completely appreciate.