Well – the pot is just that much bigger now for the non-V7N version of the contest thanks to Mike Grehan. Mike’s promised to put $1000 in so I’ll assume for now he means he’ll pay out for the #1 slot only unless I hear otherwise from him. That makes the current prize from The Collective to be:
#1 – $3000
#2 – $1000
#3-#5 – $200 each

remember – no link to V7N and at least one link to mattcutts.com – note the lack off www

Now I don’t really have anything at all against John. I’ve never even met the guy. I’m really just havin some fun but John went and closed the orginal contest thread at V7N and opened a new ‘members only’ thread. That’s the equivalent of taking your ball and going home. So now I’m kind of annoyed at him. C’mon John – we’re all discussing it publicly. It would be nice if you joined us. I’ll even buy the beer

Now – for all you guys asking about joining both contests – go right ahead and please win John’s. I’ll wait while you figure that out…

Well the new year promises to be rung in with style and controversy. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – SEO is fun again.

John Scott over at V7N forums has announced the next SEO contest and of course this has done nothing but stir up some shit – as it should. To quote John:

Now I may be a nice, generous person, but I’m not giving away money for free. In order to qualify, the page must have a link back to the v7n home page. Participants who don’t maintain a link to the v7n home page will be disqualified.

Of course I snipped a bit off the end to further the controversy.

So what’s next? We only need to look as far as WebGuerrilla and his contest and you can see where this is going in a hurry…

Can you see what’s about to happen here?….wait for it….

I can’t help but throw my hat in the ring by matching WebGuerrilla’s dollar amounts and terms. Those terms are:

A) Not linking to V7N

and

B) Posting a link to Matt’s blog without using the www. (the non-www version of Matt’s blog is only a PR4, so it needs a little help)

As a small aside I must tip my hat to John on this one – he just got himself more links to his forums via this silly contest than he would have from the contest itself thanks to Greg picking up the story.

Now let’s sit back and wait for John to pick his magic nonsense term and then see who’s the last man standing.

I keep forgetting that the people I blog about may actually swing by here and read as in the case of Jeremy Zawodny. He stopped by and did me the favor of a link to my recent post about his Sponsored Links. Here’s what he had to say:

#3 In Links, Condoms, Shit and Fans we learn that I’m “essentially daring the engines to throttle his outflow of link juice.”

I assure you, if that was my goal I could have come up with a much more dramatic way of doing it. (No, I’d rather not explain what that might be.)

But, hey, good attempt to make it look like I’m playing chicken with the folks in Mountain View or my co-workers. I’d give it a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10.

So let me clarify. I’m sure that Jeremey did not wake up one morning and decide that he should get in a game of chicken with Matt and Google. Rather, he decided that maybe he could make some pocket change promoting advertisers he deemed acceptable to put on his blog. That’s totally cool and I don’t think it should prompt any response from anyone at all. It’s his blog he can do as he pleases. But….

There is a bigger picture and no matter how innocent Jeremy’s intentions are the fact remains that his decision to sell links has an impact on the industry. Sorry Jeremy – nothing personal