Yes, it would be better than what is happening now and I don't believe that any serious competitor would do it.
Sabotage might be a problem but lets get real. What is a directory meant to do - compete on your keywords or boost your site? And unless I've missed something but nobody goes around giving special attention to every new listing, creating external links to it. My homepage will list a few sites (usually the newest) but it's a temporary spot. It's really important that a directory comp measures the boost to your site. My directories are there to help my listings, not compete with them. The overall combined effect might mean that I get hits for MY keywords or for obscure phrases others don't cater for but I don't want my directories to rank well for Directory Contest. I do want my directories to be a valuable backlink though. However until the rules are set my forum sig stays as is
You are joking, right? Again, for all those that are complaining several weeks after the fact - start your own contest! Mike asked for suggestions weeks ago - very few people gave him any feedback.
No. The actual domain directoryconest.com seems to be already penalized by G because people use it as an anchor text to link to different sites. So what would be the conclusion of the contest? DirectoryX is the strongest directory and will outrank you and get you penalized? In a closed forum for most of us that wanted to participate and then the rules where changed and rechanged.
Give me a break, that thread is October 21st, one day later How are people supposed to comment on something they haven't seen?
I respect very much Blogmaster initiative, but I already expressed my opinion this contest is only for recreational proposes, not a tool to benchmark directories, so we must look at it that way. I find this very irregular in my opinion the winner decision should be based on the average off all know google datacenters. Also this contest experiment would be very instructive among other things we are going to discover if google penalizes ors ban’s sites that are heavily linked to fast with the same anchor text .
Show me an SEO competition that has done this - not to say this is an SEO competition, but since you say this is "irregular" - I need to understand what is regular.
As we all know different google datacenters give different results, so the most correct way in my opinion is to do a average of all datacenters, this doesn’t make sense to you?
Are you implying that there's no seo competition that does rank aggregation? Or are you simply asking what's regular in such a contest?
I haven't participated in any of the seo contests, so the ignorance is mutual. To me, considering multiple data centers doesn't sound like a stupid idea like you may feel, given that google's ranking algorithm is vastly distributed. If the contest holder still decides to stick with one data center, it might be better to pre-announce what data center they will use, so that there's less controversy on who is the 1st, 2nd, etc later. There might be a better alternative... Anyway, the earlier it's decided, the better it is to everybody who's participating.
It has already been decided - the contest organizer will type in the query at google and get the results.
The rules have been what they are for a while now, and regardless of what people think about the backlinks to the categories, that is now what has been decided on. And if a directory is strong in itself, that is the most important thing. Backlinks may help a little bit here and there, but in Google you can't outrank a good directory with one that Google doesn't like, no matter how many backlinks you may have
This contest is creating a lot of ongoing interest and posts and the 'bottom line is' that all will benefit from this contest There will be actual winners and virtual winners but the main point is that all involved will win something Thats what this is all about participation
Absolutely! And I will also post the non cash prizes lateron, it will be a big list. I may be overlooking a few here and there, so if you all bear with me ... we can do this - Mike