Interesting that you’re involved in aviation. I too. Check out the http://www.happiest-flying.blogspot.com blog that I’m stumbling through. And, if you’re ever in Seattle, I’d be happy to take you flying in a Diamond 20, 40, 42 or a Columbia 400 if you’d like, though we’d probably have to throw some cash at the flight school. But, it would be well below market rate…..

Regards,

Afraid of results ?????

PS : If you’re gonna do it without manual changes in ranks please

1. I apologize. I didn’t mean YOU piss me off, rather the idea in general, but it did look attack-like from my response and that was bad by me.

2. I also agree with you that V7dotcom is probably inferior to the type of study you suggest. Interesting though that the V7 listings do appear to be propagating much like “normal” ones. Google prefers to avoid manual intervention and I’m guessing they’ll avoid it here as well.

Ryan – Maybe I’m splitting hairs a bit but you are doing what people should NOT do and that’s starting to accept Google’s most restrictive interpretation of their rules as the “correct” one. In the traditions of early Google I say they/we should use less restrictive interpretations of the guidelines. But even with restrictive use I’d say that the V7 contest does meet the criteria you cite above as follows:

Useful – V7 sites are useful to many both as experiments and as a big SEO news item.

Info rich – look at all the listings! Most have LOTS of relevant, real information about the contest. Those that do not don’t rank well. hmmmmmm

Accurately describe your content: Again, most do this while those like the “hotel” site (hi DaveN) create a fiction and make it clear it’s a fiction.

The more I watch the contest the more convinced I am it’s fun, educational, and legitimate. I wish Matt would weigh in but I think he can’t cuz it’s an “Algorithmic item”.

Then you have no reason to be pissed off at me. I wonder how you feel about people putting words into other people’s mouths, though, and deliberately misrepresenting and misconstruing what those other people say.

Nonetheless, the v7ndotcom contest reveals nothing about relevancy, and is little more than a call to spammers to have some fun and earn some money. Legitimate people may have gotten involved in it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the results have been spammed to death (with 6 milllion+ raw hits).

A much more reliable SEO contest would not use the cattle call approach. It would require independent judging by panels and evaluation of live projects (with full non-disclosure agreements to ensure contestants’ contracts were not violated or compromised).

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

how is a page that ranks for a nonsense term useful or information rich?

Doesn’t information have to involve real words?

After all, v7ndotcom elursrebmem is a “Come and get it!” call to spammers. Why not take advantage of their audacity and track them down, one by one.

Maybe John Scott is on Google’s payroll, serving as an industrial spy, enticing the black hats to come out with the v7ndotcom elursrebmem contest so that Google can finally track them all down and nuke them.

Frankly, I’m not entirely sure we can trust Matt to be our advocate at Google any longer. He may actually be putting their interests first, since he is a stockholder.