SEO Challenge ’09 – Final Results and the Winners!
Ajith | Feb 2009 | SEO Challenge
Folks, after seven weeks long intensive keyword optimization and hectic post schedules a few SEO heroes have emerged! Well, we almost knew them from the very beginning due to their focussed effort and multiple strategies used to win the SEO Challenge ’09 blog competition. Towards the end it was the matter of deciding who among the top three or four will be the champ!
As I mentioned in the competiton rules the winner is picked based on the % search traffic gain obtained during this year (Jan 01 – Feb 15), as compared to the month of December 2008. And the winners are…
http://www.otooo.com (1020.00%)
http://www.millionclues.com (859.80%)
http://www.technosamrat.com (851.21%)
http://www.techpp.com (597.44%)
http://www.madworldwii.com (226.44%)
Please join me in congratulating the winners and let us not forget each and every participant who gave them a fight! Thanks folks!
Please check out the our live scorecard for more details such as Week 1 to Week 6 numbers and final ranks. Also I am publishing the screenshots of the top three competitors with their permission. I am picking the top three because that’s where the action took place towards the end.
otoo.com
millionclues.com
technosamrat.com (a couple of fields blurred on his request)
The Week 6 turnaround
The Week 6 witnessed the top three competitors accelerating really fast in a neck-to-neck competition and Simon (otooo.com) managed to overtake Arun (millionclues.com) whereas Samrat (technosamrat.com) missed the second rank by a very narrow margin. Week 06 performance by Simon, Samrat and Raju (techpp.com) were really impressive whereas Arun slowed down a wee bit that cost him the first place!
Exciting prizes for the Top 5!
As promised the following wonderful prizes will be distributed among the top 5. Thanks to our sponsors for these prizes!
First Prize for Simon
1 Year Class ‘C’ IP SEO Hosting by SEO Hosting (worth $420)
PPC Advertiser Campaign by Bidvertiser (worth $100)
PayPal Cash Prize by Sponsored Reviews ($100)
Simon, I hope that the class ‘C’ IP hosting will boost your SEO Optimization campaigns in the future and PPC advertising for sure is good anytime. As for cash, well, who will not take it?
Second Prize for Arun
6 Months Subscription to Online Profits (worth $288)
1 Year Business Plan Hosting by Host Gator (worth $180)
Arun, I am sure that Daniel Scocco’s new venture will enlighten you about online money making even more and you can now empower your domain(s) with a business hosting plan now!
Consolation Prizes for Samrat, Raju and Ryan
1 Year shared hosting by Host Gator (worth $120 each)
Needless to say you have just won one of the best hosting services in the business, and I am sure all three of you will maximize your blog’s performance with the new hosting option.
Congratulations once again! I shall contact you by email within two days and provide instructions on how to collect your prizes.
Dollar$hower SEO Challenge ’09 Sponsors
A big Thank you…
I would like to thank our sponsors for the trust, Daniel Scocco for his guidance, all participants for passion and all readers of this blog for your wonderful support. I am grateful to Lax (techzoomin) for the wonderful banners that he and his friend sponsored.
Finally, let me request all of you to share your experiences and any feedback/suggestion as well. This will help us to improve for the coming editions of the SEO Challenge competition (which will be mostly in other formats).
PS: I am still dreaming about the 1000% gain and if I get there, my main blogging objective for the year is already met 
Congrats to all winners… It was really a very good contest. I used to check the scores regularly. According to me, technosamrat is the real winner. What he has achieved is wonderful compared with first two… Anyways, full hearted wishes to all winners and you
Congratulations to all the winners.
Ajith, this competition was indeed a great one and most importantly innovative one.
I have also learned few things about SEO. Thanks again to all…
Yeah, I got the 1000% gain and won – so pumped
Congrats to all the other winners as well and let’s hope we can keep the SE traffic increasing
Congrats to all the winners.
Ajith is a smart guy, he controlled things in all the situations..
I couldn’t concentrate more on the contest, due to my exams..Will come up strongly in the next episode
Ajith, adding one more point. do think about the blogs who have lot of traffic already. For them it is difficult to get 1000% increase
Congrats everyone and Thanks a lot Ajith. Personally I have learnt so much during these 5-6 weeks. It has been a turn around in my short blogging career. I was not sure if I should enter the contest at first place as I am very lazy by nature and didn’t want to make a fool of myself here. But once I entered the contest, I got to read few articles on SEO and learned few things. Thanks again Ajith. And great job all!
Ajith, congratulations on the completion of a great contest. You have worked really hard in collating the data and posting these posts regularly. Hope you will share your learnings soon.
Btw can you post about your general observations like share of yahoo and other search engines in different domains, trend of traffic for posts about hot keywords etc.
Finally you should plan for a consolation prize for Nihar, since he has achieved the highest increase in absolute number of visitors.
Congratulations to all the winners. Great contest Ajith..Keep rocking.. TechZoomIn managed to sit at 6th place.
Overall i can say a very good contest to participate with new concept and new rules. To be honest i didn’t tried anything much to win,as am busy with my other online projects.
Great Great Great..keep rocking.
@binary day,
just to correct you, samrat has got the highest as per absolute increase and then me. I do agree with Nihar that it was tough for him from Day 1.
I would like to greet everyone CONGRATULATIONS! Yes everyone, even the losers like me
For you Ajith as well.
Congrats to everyone. It was a really good contest Ajith.
Wow a great contest!!!
Congrats for all the winners.. including myselves !! Though I missed the 2nd place by a narrow margin..I had the best absolute increase in the visitor count!!
The competition has been really very good.. learned a lot of things and gave me a real boost……Thanks Ajith..
I feel a lot honoured. Thank you DS!!!
Special Congrats to Simon, Great work Dude.
Extra Special Congrats to Technosamrat, Techapp, PC’s Place and Nihars World. In terms or Quantity of increase Nihars World is the winner. And the others in here follow. Thats awesome guys, you are the real SEO gurus and I look forward to learn from you all..
Search Results were poor in the last week, dont know why, there are somethings beyond our control.. right..? And I cant wait to start learning from the Online Profits! Its going to be a priceless experience to associate with industry’s top bloggers.
I hope everyone takes home something from this contest. And you Ajith, you get to analyse all the 32 blogs, so you are the big winner. Do share some of the big lessons.. okie..?
Good luck everyone,
See you all here in the comments area sometime. (or in twitter!! )
Cheers
Arun Basil Lal
Well done guys! And thanks for running the contest, Ajith.
Congrats to the winners. I too achieved my objective of making into positive gain. Thanks for the contest, Ajith.
Richael Neet’s last blog post… The Blogging Park – Where blogging is fun!
I agree with Arun, that by holding this Ajith has gained a wealth of information in the form of what keywords were working for the competitors, so he can use these to target and gain some good SE traffic himself
Simon’s last blog post… Woman Going Insane After Missing Her Flight : Watch Video
I should have won this contest.. darn!
Anyway, Congratulations to the winners! take Care always! and happy blogging!
Ajith, congrats for successfully completing your first Blogging competition. This was one of the unique & best competition which I have heard in the recent times. Keep up the good work. And also, congrats to all the winners.
Prasanna’s last blog post… How to use your website or blog URL as an OpenID
Ajith, this is a great contest, earing for getting more traffic is really nice award, I wish you run this kind of contest again and encourage the winners to share more tips. Thanks.
Great Contest..
I missed the top 5.. But I learned a lot..
Congratulations to all the winners..
Ajith, bring in more contests like this.. and do plan prizes for top 10 contestants..
PC’s last blog post… How to Make Ready Boost Default in Vista
Folks, thanks for your support. Instead of replying to all comments point-to-point let me share my experiences and thoughts on your feedback.
To be frank, I was thoroughly exhausted conducting this event due to the manual effort involved in capturing data, maintaining it and communicating with people.
Unlike the common perception (from some of the comments above) I didn’t gain any insider knowledge or store any information regarding any of the Google analytics account shared. Not even for a moment, I have peeped into search activities (beyond the bare minimum needed) on any of these blogs and nor have I have studied any keyword tactics. The only thing I checked for was any self-searches or repeated patterns from specific geographic areas. I am really being honest here and all that I have stored are the participants name, email, GA account ID, URL and those six or seven values that are displayed in the scorecard. Also, the only screenshots (three of them) I have taken with permission from the participants have been shared.
Next time, I will be doing the SEO challenge in a different way so that most things can be automated to leave no room for complaints
Of course, I had my learnings… I now know that it’s realistically possible to increase search traffic to any amount
Thanks once again for playing the competition in its true spirit! You may unshare your GA accounts now (prize winners may share it on request again, just in case sponsors have any queries)
Ajith, you did a great work with this contest. I’ve seen larger SEO blogs trying similar contests and not achieving as good a result!
I will be waiting for the next one.
Daniel Scocco’s last blog post… Advertising Options on TechCult
Great contest guys and congrats to the winner
2ask.ws’s last blog post… FREE BOOKMARK AUTO SUBMITTER PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS
All in all great dude. Keep up the hard work Ajith.
TechZoomIn’s last blog post… Organize Series:Plugin to Maintain Series of Posts
Congratulation to the winners
And great competition Ajith. Congrats to you too.
Kurt Avish’s last blog post… CNT Blueline Buses – A Logic without logic
@Daniel, thanks for all your help and support. Well, I will be back with the next one by year end
@Ajith,
We all shall be waiting for it. Btw you aware of any source from which I can find out information about seo contests or blogging contests.
binaryday’s last blog post… Keyword difficulty analysis
@binaryday, I had written a post about contest blogs sometime back… Please check that out. It has some ten of those contest blogs listed (You could search my blog or browse Articles before searching elsewhere for such info
)
http://www.dollarshower.com/blog-contests-are-they-for-you/
Ajith,
Wonderful job. I salute you for the unbelievable amount of effort that you’ve put to make this contest a great success. I’m sure you’ve had lot of sleepless nights to manage this contest with your full-time job and part-time blogging.
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@Ajith,
Thanks for that link to contest blogs. Btw, I am surprised that the winning bloggers have not started writing about their win!!! I was expecting you will get at least 5 links from the 5 winners…or I am missing something??
binaryday’s last blog post… Comprehensive guide on ‘building backlinks for Bloggers’
@ Binarday
Time is the villan, its exam time.. lol… Can I be quiet after winning something like this..? Nah…
Cheers
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@Ramesh, tell me about it
@binaryday, one cannot buy love, right? But did you see the trackback above in Indonesian lang… At least one person has written about it though he was not a winner
Congrats Every One…. @ Raju Congrats Buddy
Nicholas | Pixobyte.com’s last blog post… Pixobyte Valentines day Giveaway , Win prizes worth more than 200$
Congratz to all the winners. I’ll wait to next competition
ardi’s last blog post… DollarShower.Com – SEO Challenge ‘09 Sudah Berakhir
As always, I’m the late to Wish. Congratulations to all the winners.
@Ajith, thanks for organizing this. I have come to know lot of things on SEO.
Great job Ajith and congrats to all the winners
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Ajith, you have been working hard on this contest. I can imagine how you balanced your professional life and blogging life. I have gone through this once, and was almost sleepless for few weeks.
This contest had been a great success it looks like and introduced me to some nice new blogs and techniques they have used. On my part, I think bad patch of my search engine traffic coincided with the contest timing (LOL) and it started gearing up again. But by no way, it was easy to achieve what they top 5 blogs have achieved. Congrats everyone!
Life is Colourful’s last blog post… Oscar 2009 – Will Slumdog Millionaire Win?
@Folks, thanks for your compliments and/or participation
I got too busy lately so it’s only now that i got time to visit blogs again. Hats off to you Ajith for the great job you did here. We know it is not an ordinary contest and it takes a lot of time and effort to complete this. Two thumbs up to you.
And of course, congratulations to all the winners! All your efforts have obviously paid off.
Just wondering if there will be a part 2 of this.
@Frenchy, welcome back and thanks for your comments. There’ll be a second edition for sure.
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