V7Ndotcom Elursrebmem - History

History

The first recorded SEO Contest was Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat by German webmasters, started on 2002 November 15 in the German-language usenet group de.comm.infosystems.www.authoring.misc. In the English-language world, the nigritude ultramarine competition created by DarkBlue.com and run by SearchGuild is widely acclaimed as the mother of all SEO contests. It was started on May 7, 2004, and was won two months later by Anil Dash. On September 1 of the same year, webmasters were challenged to rank number 1 on Google in three months' time for the search phrase seraphim proudleduck.

In the first quarter of 2005, people were competing for the term loquine glupe, spawning web sites ranging from shampoo advertising to holiday resorts. The page that won in the end looked rather boring, and used lots of questionable techniques like "keyword stuffing".

Internationally, in 2005 two major contests took place in Europe. In Germany the Hommingberger Gepardenforelle by the computer magazine c't spawned almost 4 million results. The goal was to find out how search engines rank sites. In Poland almost at same time the Polish SEO community organized the msnbetter thangoogle contest. It topped the 4 million but failed to reach its goal to promote SEO in Poland and to get search engines companies' attention for the Polish market. Some current and pending contests are listed below.

A competition ran from January 1, 2006, to March 1, 2006, and carried the term redscowl bluesingsky, another set of made-up words. It was sponsored by SEOLogs. Shoemoney won this contest, and since he contributed the winner's money, he donated it to the number 2 winner.

Since then, SEO contests have become a part of some academic classes. In 2008 Luis von Ahn at CMU created a contest for his students, and in 2010 Adam Wierman picked it up at Caltech.