74 chml srucnoc: spam Google, win a prize

A Romanian Web-hosting and design business (CHML Web Services) came up with an interesting self-promotion plan under the guise of a SEO contest.

The idea is rather simple. The company offers about $1,300 in cash and several hosting packages (from their own hosting services) as prizes. Each contestant has to join the contest with one single webpage, which they need to boost in the Google search results when a certain key phrase (chml srucnoc) is used. The contest will last 4 months (from August to December).

SEO contests are not a new thing, but this is the first of its kind organized by a Romanian company, for Romanian SEO’s. Let’s take a look at how this premiere is doing.

1. How the contest is organized

1.1. CHML rules with an iron fist

The terms imposed upon the contestants are very heavily biased in favor of CHML.

CHML gets to decide the winner even in spite of the Google results, based on the fact that the datacenter results may differ on the day of the ruling. The terms of the contest are vague enough to allow for arbitrary disqualifications at the organizers’ will. They get to change the terms without prior notice. They don’t allow contestants to protest in any way about anything and assumes no responsability for anything the contestants do to win.

Given some of the things I see Romanians using the Web for every day, perhaps it’s only natural for the organizers to attempt to protect themselves to this degree. It’s just that in a more lax environment such terms would definitely raise an eyebrow or two. They require quite a lot of faith from the contestants, in that they trust the organizers to be correct. This remains to be seen.

1.2. No do’s or don’t’s

CHML made no attempt to impose any rules whatsoever detailing any do’s and don’t’s ie. black or white hat SEO techniques, although some of them are quite simple to uncover.

Given that SEO tactics usually take all kinds of shades from “white hat” (good) to “black hat” (evil), CHML’s refusal to monitor and police the contestants, as well as refusal to assume any responsability, is quite a bit on the wild side. SEO contests have long been criticized because they set off large numbers of individuals, all bent on using all kinds of methods, many of them dirty, for making Google recognize their website as the most “relevant” for the given search phrase. You may rightly wonder: how can a company simply set off something like this and not care about anything except personal gain? How are they morally different from email spammers?

This only goes to emphasize the tacky side of such contests, the bitter taste that inevitably follows some of the things that the participants usually endulge in. It sends the message that anybody can come and throw in the promise of money, and it’s enough to make people go rampant all over the Web, disrupting discussions and services for someone else’s gain.

1.3. No other details

To sum it up: CHML does everything they want to, contestants have no say, everything goes. No other details are necessary.

…Except they are. SEO is quite a complex field, it’s considered somewhat of an arcane art. It would’ve helped to expand on it. Are the organizers themselves any good at it? Are they able to pass judgement upon whatever the contestants do? Will they? Since SEO can be “good” and “bad”, will they care? Will they monitor the tehniques used to win the contest?

And so on and so forth. These questions would take some discussing, because they uncover complex issues. Yet we get nothing other than what I mentioned above.

2. The self-promotion

2.1. How it’s done

Contestants link to CHML’s sites and thus pass Google PageRank, as well as increase awareness in all kinds of online communities.

First of all, the company requires all participants to link from their competing page to 3 websites, chosen from a total of 24, all of which are related to the organizers. As the contestant work hard to push their pages up the Google search results, they are at the same time promoting the links to the company’s websites and the company’s main site. Furthermore, the contestants themselves set up pages linking to the contest page and the CHML home page.

Secondly, the search phrase itself contains obvious advertising for the organizers: chml srucnoc. There’s a twist to this, and it’s something I don’t recall a SEO contest doing in the past. Whenever a search phrase would include the organizer’s domain name it would be in a sort of a “captcha” form, such as ambatchdotcom or v7ndotcom ie. so as not to viciate the contest search results by promoting the organizer’s site.

2.2. It’s definitely a bargain

The CHML company gets SEO promotion, no method restrictions, for 24 sites, for 4 months, for a fraction of the price they’d have to pay a professional to do it.

The grand total spent for prizes comes up to $1,300. I don’t take into account the value of the hosting services because it’s their own hosting.

According to certain industry claims, the tarrifs for SEO work start at $250, per month, per site. That adds up to a lot more than $1,300. Not to mention that this is SEO done via all kinds of methods, through a distributed number of sites, by tens of participants, which is something that a regular SEO company would have to work hard to achieve.

2.3. Is it working? Will it last?

How much exposure will CHML get out of this? Where do they intend to take it?

You can check for yourself. For one thing, cast your eyes at the Alexa traffic rankings for chml.ro, starting August 2006.

They’d also be smart to get some media exposure besides the Internet. After all, they’re doing this to promote CHML as a business, sell it to the Romanian market. It’s not going to do much good if only the SEO geeks find out about it. Some articles in newspapers and perhaps an award ceremony, no matter how small, would probably be a good idea. Romania is a small country and the main IT consumers are located in the capital, it wouldn’t be very hard to get some publicity with a little more effort.

Otherwise, once the contest is over the whole thing will pop like a soap bubble. Already, after the initial enthuziasm, the news wore off fast in IT forums and the Alexa traffic ranking shows it.

3. What of the consequences?

Of course, artificially boosting a page’s search results alone is against the Google terms of use, let alone organizing an entire spam-fest. Google may or may not have something to say about it. Based on how they have traditionally handled such contests, they’ll probably allow it, because it helps them to uncover and test their resilience against black hat SEO methods.

Within days of the contest start participants were already endulging in spam of all kinds. They were posting links on public forums, blogs, friends’ sites, social bookmarking services, via email or instant messengers. There was even an attempt to post links in this article’s comments.

Ubiquitous connectivity has so far served both good causes, such as distributed computing projects, and bad purposes, such as malware botnets designed to propagate, steal computer resources and use them for their masters’ evil ways. But have we finally reached the age of the human Internet mercenary?

Usually, when people agreed willingly to lend their skills and resources to distributed projects, it would be for a good thing. Online communities or projects such as the Open Directory or open-source software are a testimony to this.

But is it really so simple to garner the minds of individuals and make them serve you? I have to wonder, is it just happenstance that the more ugly side of SEO contests would be more at home in a country like Romania, where the promise of $550 just in time for Christmas means a lot? Is it just chance that makes Westerners pick poor Asians to slave for them in virtual MMORPG sweatshops for 56 cents an hour? Is connectivity simply translating to “anytime, anywhere, anything goes?”

4. The outcome

So, the contest is over. It would be unfair to say it wasn’t useful: I got to see lots of both “good” and “bad” SEO at work. A lot of the techniques I witnessed are just what I feared: spam, using any method that’s liable to get a worthy link.

How did I do? I simply published the page you’re reading right now and pulled almost nothing from the fat bag of tricks that is sometimes called “the dark art of SEO”. I still came up 3rd in the Google results (and I’m probably still around that position today).

Conclusion? Write useful content, put together a good site and at the end of the day you’ll have a good site to show for it. There is good advice to be learned from SEO, which will give your site that extra bit of edge.

But there’s also a line beyond which you only get smoke in the eyes. Your artificial standings in the search engine results won’t last (they cannot, possibly). The visitors will feel cheated. At the end of the day you end up with nothing, in the way of good Web content. It’s great if all you wanted was to make a quick buck selling snake oil, but very bad if you thought you were establishing yourself as a respectable presence on the Internet. And speaking of snake oil, by that time the “black hat SEO artist” and your money are long gone.

(There are a couple more interesting points on this note, in Romanian, on World Domination.)