I have a website and I would like to add a contest to my website, a contest with monthly prizes for those who contribute to the website. But I don't know if this will have a positive impact on google ranking. Is giving prizes to visitors against google guidelines ? Thank you.
The only positive effect is contests can bring more traffic to your website. Giving prize is fine as long as it is not related on the encourage click or similar activity. Not true. Visitor stay longer will not raise the PR
Thanks for the replays. Now let's say I rate people after the reviews they make to my products ? Or by how many products they rate? Is still OK ? I do not encourage them to click the google commercials or other advertising on my pages.
it doesnt sounds like its against the T's&C's. If you where to encourage clicks on your ads or to offer incentives for people to link to you, then this may be against the t's&c's.
It will attracts more visitors of course and it will not violating google TOS because there are many incentive and prize websites out there but still rank fine. I will focus on bring visitors rather than increasing PR. The purpose of website is to have massive traffics and it doesn't matter if the PR is low as long as i have consistent traffics and it can convert into money if i sell something.
There are many direct and indirect impacts on PR of better Time on site. 1. It indicates more traffic which has direct impact on PR 2. People who are engaged with your website more are liable to tell it to others ( means backlinks) You will get many natural backlinks. Google loves them.
People may not want to invite competition. I suppose it would bring more repeats of people looking for results. Prizes cost money, so is the extra number of visitors worth the expenditure?
Written proof please for both points. Yes, you will get more links as folks will be promoting the contest on your site but I would love to see written proof of a correlation between time spent on site and improved pr. Your point #2 is hearsay and in all my years of SEO, I've never seen your first point even mentioned. More traffic does not mean a higher pr. If that was so, all these sites buying eyeball views would have pr's of 10 by now. PR is determined by backlinks and the quality of said backlinks. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank