Justin,

It looks like for now, you have the top spot! It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of weeks…

LOL…You Go BOY! I think you popped over me this morning.

Those Squidoo pages may rank, but they won’t pass any juice.

Hey Bob,
From my research, the squidoo links do pass some juice. But after giving it some more thought… with the competition the way it is, those hub pages probably won’t do very well unless I spend time working on them individually… and I’m not planning on spending a great deal of time with this.

Looks like this site is kickin in the race. I am surprised at the viral buzz around this project. Makes the race more fun. I have joined team Blackwell in this endeavor.

Thanks for the post. I never heard of hub page creation but it’s an interesting concept. Keep it coming!

You are winning today!

So will this help to drive a blogsite to the top of the search engines by linking to it from the hub page or something like that? This is a very interesting concept. Awesome!

Justin,

If you are planning to go to Inman in San Francisco this year, I’d like to meet you.

Sorry to see you drop out Justin, but I totally understand.

I like your list of improvements to the rules if it was to be done again.

Says a lot about a person when they are #1 and quit.

Best,

Just a quick note - this contest was NOT started by REW (Real Estate Webmasters) it was started by Eric Bramlett (http://www.ericbramlett.com) - I simply blogged about it because I was asked to so that I could help him get the word out to more people and contributed a prize to make it more fun. So for people who “are” participating and “do” like the contest, give the credit to Eric as it is his initiative.

I’d have to agree a big part of the SEO that I see and unfortunately use reeks of spam. Blog articles packed full of keywords, links from anyone who’s willing to give them to me, Digg, Stumble, paid Google CPC and yahoo directories, but fortunately for me and many others it gets people to our sites to buy from us rather than the millions of other salespeople out there. On a brighter note, it’s a hell of a lot less intrusive than cold calls and door knocking.

Anyway, sorry to see you drop out. Take care.

I hope this contest does not turn into a spam fest as you say. Maybe I am being ignorant, but I still think this will be a good learning experience.

I don’t think it will be any bigger than the spam fest that already existed in real estate.

Justin, come back in!

Justin, there is nothing wrong with this being what it is. A spam fest. Real life imitated by art (or something like that).
Nobody cares about the prize, but everyone will get a lot out of it.
Would you rather have this in a perfect world type of setting which doesn’t reflect reality?

Sorry you dropped out, but understand your reasoning.

Justin;

Sorry to hear that you are bowing out. I agree with you that a longer contest would have a more “educational” benefit to it. I don’t think it would generate the enthusiasm this one has to date if it was that long.

I respect your decision.

Best

Eric

Justin - I too have decided to watch this one from the sidelines. My rationale was that first & foremost, I sell real estate, and if I were so inclined to spend my time optimizing a webpage / blogpost, I’d be far better off spending it on pages that give me a ROI. Not to mention that the big G has a microscope on real estate websites & blogs, and flying under the radar has always served me well.

I wish all competitors the best of luck, and will be watching carefully as the contest closes ….

How can something be Spam, when it is just for a silly competition? What SEO technique wouldn’t be SPAM when the only reason your trying to do it is for a competition. Nothing would be real, but everything would be just to try and get that term “greatest real estate agent in the world.”

Justin ~ You’d be better off spending your time doing something of value, like teaching agents how to write good content.

I highly doubt that we’re going to see any revolutionary new seo methods being used by the participants anyway.

Not a chance. Most don’t know any, and those that do won’t give them up or subject themselves to the scrutiny that Boser mentioned. All these guys are doing is telling the world what they do know, which pretty much defeats the purpose.

only lend further to the growing opinion in the real estate blogosphere that all seo is spam.

Agreed, but there is a bit of a silver lining to that if you think about it.

make it more fair to the website that doesn’t already carry a high trust rank.

Probably your most important point, IMO. Greg Boser wins if he chooses to, regardless of what anyone thinks, if for no other reason than his domain has more authority than any of the others by far. The only way to trump that is a ton of links, which would likely dwarf any amount they would have acquired in a similar time frame. But hey, if you want to take a money making site that many use to feed their families and play a meaningless game while waving a flag at a search engine, then all I have to say is - I wish more agents in San Diego would jump in.

Comment spam FTW!

I highly admire the fact you decided to drop out of this competition.

I really agree with your idea of using more keywords in a competition. This would really be useful in finding ways to do SEO for several keywords at once.

I can’t blame you for dropping out. The way this contest was setup it looked like anyone other than a select few, would have to do some very questionable things which Google would likely not like very much, and who needs those kinds of issues.

Morristown, How questionable is a firefox extension and a youtube video? You don’t have to do anything questionable, just think outside of the box;)

Quote: “It’s just not worth it to me to tarnish my reputation simply because some people have an extremely loose definition of spam.”

I think yo’re missing the point here. It’s not worth, rather, to tarnish your reputation becasue of some silly worthless ‘contest’ that makes otherwise level-headed estate agents rush out and post spammy comments all over the place like a herd of cows trampling the daisies.

Why is everyone so cynical about this? Running a race for a “worthless” blue ribbon can still be fun. It’s a contest, if it isn’t fun don’t do it but putting down the race because you don’t like to exercise isn’t fair.

It’s not that I’m cynical about it… I just view it as a waste of time, and can’t see anything good coming out of it. I don’t doubt that some people are having a good time such as: the greatestrealestateagentintheworld.org guys…

I just don’t see it as being valuable for my business. I hope Eric and Morgan don’t think that I am bashing their idea in any way. I just personally think that it could have been thought out a little more, and have better guidelines.

I’d like to get involve with the greatest website but the new NAR code of ethics may actually prevent me from competing in the long run as I use MLS in my domain name!

if I win my ethics violation I’ll be trying to win the greatest agent prizes

Speaking as a newbie, I think that I have actually learned quite a bit about SEO from the contest and related controversy… even though I’m just watching from the sidelines.

The ideas that you propose for a future contest are great. I agree with you that this contest is turning into a “spam fest”. Could you share with us what are the other keywords you would suggest for a future contest?

wow i’m from the UK and didn’t even know this competition was running. unfortunately (or fortunately!) i’m not a real estate agent, but i think if i were i would probably opt out of a comptetion like this. i’ve not sure that the benefits of winning would be positive anyway. it may lead to a lot of headache for the winner and detract from your main business, which is real estate!

My compliments to you Justin for dropping out of the competition and calling it what it was, a “spam fest”.

There is no way that a contest like this can be run without implementing unsavory SEO techniques. And with as much scrutiny as the real estate industry is under with Google I am amazed that anyone participated.

I like many of your ideas about a proper SEO Contest. I would add to your list;

a) A new domain must be created specifically for the contest.
b) The new domain may NOT have city and state within it.
c) All contestants to create a site for the same city and state.
d) No Agent, Broker or Company may be named as owner of the website.
e) At the end of the contest the winning domain will be auctioned off to any real estate Agent, Broker or Company with proceeds to go to the Designer/SEOs favorite charity.

Ardell really did make many good points about real estate and the SEO industry and perception is everything.

And yes Bob I agree that Greg Boser could have easily won if he had chosen to do so. It appears that he intentionally threw his chances of winning with Part 2 in his Blog. But I can’t say that I blame him for obvious reasons.

~Mack

@Mack: Thanks for the comment. Very interesting ideas… any number of those would make a contest like this much more valid.

@Mount: See Mack’s ideas

ps. all ‘Realtors’ that are participating in this are using the term ‘Realtor’ in a way prohibited by NAR.

There can be no descriptive terms before the word ‘Realtor’.
i.e. Best Realtor, Greatest Realtor, etc etc etc etc

The word is trademarked by NAR. A simple email to the right person will get your site canned. have a nice day.

Which is why it’s the “Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World” Contest… not the Greatest Realtor.

happens to me all the time. just because you use a good anchor text they automatically tag you as spam. IMO, as long as the comment is relevant and adds value to the discussion then it’s not spam whatever anchor you may use

The hub page part was really interesting. I will have to for sure try it on my blog. Thanks.

Hey Bob
Those Squidoo pages may rank
I think google loves squidoo , so many squidoo pages have a high page rank

I like the idea of a longer time frame like a 2-3 months, the idea of the 5-10 keywords is interesting as well. I just found out about the current contest.