If I had a contest where I gave away a free item and the entry requirement was a link to my site, would Google pentalize this as some sort of link buying scheme? Has any one ever seen anything like this work?
nah, how would they know? but if they did find out, they might frown upon it... EDIT: it's not a very good entry idea anyway - unless most of your user-base run a website. and how would you decide a "winner"?
This would be considered link baiting which is an effective form of seo. You should look up the term "link baiting" in google and read about it. I do not think google will punish you for doing this because there is no money involved, you are not selling links.
He's not selling links, but he's very close to crossing the line and being regarded as buying them. Directly offering something in return for a backlink is pretty much the same thing as offering them $5 for a link, I'd be wary of running something like this. All it takes a complaint from a competitor and a trigger-happy google employee and you're in trouble.
Well its a new domain so I don't have much to lose. Except the cost of the prize and the time spent developing the site. I will some more research before going a head with it. The way I envision it is the user enters their email address and the url they put the link on. I would require only one link per page and the page must have original content related to my site's subject. Forum and blog comments are okay but if you have control over the code the link must not be nofollow. As many enties as you like. Then after 4 months give away the prize. Still I think Google won't like it or others would be doing it.
Well time is money, I wouldnt like to throw away a lot of wasted hours. I think you've even more chance of running into trouble if you insist on that. You'll struggle to get people to enter a competiton that doesn't end for 4 months. I understand you're doing that so the links are kept, but it would need to be one hell of a prize for me to create a unique page on your topic, with a backlink. Maybe $10k, or a car or something lol.
Well I wasn't thinking people would create a page - other then a blog post - more of adding a link to an existing page or forum posting mentioning it. Some research shows it is being done without a penalty, but you are right people have been stung by very similar schemes. John Chow tops the list. He pulled a lot of other crap before being Google smacked though.
As a new site you've got far less leeway with google, they'll be more likely to hit you. If it was me I'd go ahead and do it but without the nofollow required. I doubt many would have used a nofollow anyway.