Contest Introduction Brought To You By Brian Carter
If you haven't heard, Martin Bowling loves Zima. He loves it so much (or so people say), that Google Suggest has permanently associated his name with Zima- they're officially related now.
Martin Bowling Loves Zima is a meme (a viral idea) that was started by Andy Beal and his wife, and has been embraced and fueled by search industry personalities such as Rob @SEOcracy, Sheila @govisithawaii, Todd Friesen, Brian Carter, Todd Mintz, Joshua Sciarrino, Dana Lookadoo, Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, and others.
Now Martin is announcing the Martin Bowling Loves Zima Meme Contest... it's the contest that asks "Who can create the best whatever (video, blog post, tweet series, captioned picture, avatar, twitter background, the sky is the limit - want a great example check out ZimaFan on Twitter) about the Martin Bowling Loves Zima meme?"
The prizes are awesome, the judges are cool, and the contest is going to get a LOT of attention.
Here's what you have to do by October 3rd, 2008
- Create your thing
- Put it on the internet, and you don't EVEN have to link to the contest blog post, that's right this isn't a ploy to steal your link juice :)
- Tweet about your entry with a link & Leave a comment here with your entry (just incase as we all know that twitter is sometimes teh suck)
- Rinse & Repeat, cause you can enter as many times as you'd like!
Then you wait for our judges' decision anxiously while chomping on your nails, knowing the outcome could change your entire life forever!
The second half of this post brought to you by your regularly scheduled host Martin Bowling
And now on to the good stuff, how is this going to get my ass to ScarySEO? Well here is how these are the fabulous prizes:
1st place
Win a trip to ScarySEO, (includes conference registration and Two Nights Stay at the awesome Hilton Deerfield Beach Hotel - Sorry Folks Airfare not included, unless someone would want to sponsor it :wink: )
$50 bar tab provide by yours truly, and no drinks will not be limited to Zima only :)
And one of these awesome Zima t-shirts
2nd Place
So you don't get the free ride to the awesome ScarySEO mini-con, but we still want to hook you up with some SEO knowledge so
SEOmoz SEO Training DVD’s over 7 hours of SEO knowledge from Rand & Crew
One of those awesome Zima t-shirts pictured above.
3rd place
3 month subscription to Online Reputation Management Monitoring Tool - Trackur.com subscription, so you can make sure you don't have your own Zima Meme disaster :)
Zima t-shirt
*Honorable mentions to receive random Zima treasures
**Contest will be judged by the following panel of Zima experts: Andy Beal, GoVisitHawaii, Jane Copland, Todd Friesen, Dave Snyder, Brian Carter.
If you need more details about the awesomeness of ScarySEO go check out this great post by Eric Lander (who is also speaking at ScarySEO) and if you don't win or don't enter don't forget you still have time to go register for ScarySEO.
Google Operating System starts this fiasco with the "January 1 TCP/IP" query and how Google is unfairly rewarding new pages with inflated ratings, out raking rank for everything under the sun wikipedia. So of course since this comes from Google's mouth the gates open and a flood of bloggers start picking up the news and reciting this as fact like the algorithm really had changed. BlogStorm finally offered a voice of reason:
This search had very few results and wasn't commercial enough to trigger any kind of spam filtering so straight away bloggers started to rank highly purely based on simple factors like title tags.
He then goes on to talk about the Query Deserves Freshness and how that more than likely played a major part in the way that the results were displayed for the "January 1 TCP/IP" query that started all this madness. As BlogStorm points out in the excerpt below
Because the search term "January 1 TCP/IP" went from no previous search history and very few results to millions of queries in one day it triggered the QDF algorithm ranking new content highly.
So Google OS go on and continue to make a point that people then started to game google exploiting the new algorithm. But really any of us who have been following Google Trends and how it can be gamed like LocalSEOGuide.com has been showing us all of December know that this algorithm isn't new & isn't anything excited & isn't anything that can really be gamed in a spammy kind of way. It's probably more akin to spamming on the square.
But really none of what I said it was I think this post was about, this post was all about Google OS linkbait. And if you asked me it seems to have worked beautifully. Since October the blogosphere been a buzz with talks about Google Smackdowns, the evils of PayPerPost, how all sponsors must be nofollowed and finally Matt Cutts makes the revelation that you must nofollow for all links from compensated content even links that are editorial and not from the sponsor of the post. So all this negative buzz about Google, so Google OS decides hey let's write up something nice and get the blogosphere talking about something positive an algorithm change that they can exploit! Do you really think that the Google OS people had no clue about the QDF algorithm and the ramifications that it will have on "trendy" search terms? I think Google OS is gaming the bloggers and I think it worked brilliantly.
So what else is happening tonight ABC showcasing the Wife Swap Season Premier, On Fox we have the BCS Bowl presentation of the Fiesta Bowl Tostitos Bowl Tostitos Fiesta Bowl where we see the Oklahoma Sooners take on the WVU Mountaineers. What will a WVU Victory mean to WVU Football next season or better yet what will a lose mean to Oklahoma Football?
Well guess that's enough Google Trends Gaming for me :)