According to Wired News, Anil Dash has won the Nigritude Ultramarine challenge.
“The impetus (was) for me, on a fluke, to say, ‘Hey, I don’t want these guys who do link spamming to win the contest,’” said Dash. “I figured that people would be fighting the contest the whole month and coming up with new and innovative ways to get their page ranking up, but it didn’t happen.”
Indeed, according to Brandon Suit, the first-round winner, Dash’s victory was a fait accompli from the moment he entered the competition.
[…]
Suit said he conceded to Dash a month ago, paraphrasing a consolation message he got from a friend, “Anil’s entry into this contest (was) like a NASCAR driver entering a Go-Kart race.”
Dash stated that he hopes his win will prove to people trying to spam comments to get ranking that writing good content instead is the way to go. I agree, but if that sort of thinking prevailed, the pop-up ad would have gone away a long time ago.
SEO Challenge - nigritude ultramarine: A search engine optimization site is running a contest to see who can get the number one position on Google in 30 days. The SEO Challenge will have you vying for the number one ranking on a specific search term. The term, currently with no Google…
And Wikipedia has already got a page on it, with Anil there for all posterity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigritude_ultramarine
So, at the risk of sounding totally un-geek, how'd he do it? What are the tricks to good search engine optimization?
He didn't use any tricks. That was the point, really. A lot of people read his site because it's got a lot of good content. He put up one post requesting that people link to it with the term. Enough people linked to it that it became the top search result.