Some time in early February, Eric Bramlett had the idea for an seo contest. He suggested the idea to Morgan Carey, aka SEO Guy, and owner of Real Estate Webmasters, who generously offered to sponsor the contest. With a prize of web services valued at over 4k, this generated a fair bit of excitement among the real estate webmaster and blogging community.

Morgan also added a twist to the contest, which was that each contestants entry must link to another contestant and do a write up of what they learned from that entry. To demonstrate this, he linked to Eric Blackwell’s entry, who had the great idea to form a team to compete instead of going solo. By reaching out to other Realtors, and leveraging the fact that he himself is not a Realtor, he has taken an early lead in the contest.

Of course, no contest would be complete without some controversy, which has been most notably provided by Ardell DellaLoggia, who pointed out that the initial prize offering required that the winner pay hosting fees to REW which benefitted them in the long run. Morgan’s response to this was to up the prize to include lifetime hosting, which is quite a nice bonus.

Among the Realtor community, some of the other early leaders include Ryan Ward, and Richard Soto. However, the search results have been very dynamic, and many other contestants have popped in, including:

• Boris Yututeers
• Dan Connolly
• Dennis Pease
• Dwayne West
• Jay Thompson
• Jennifer Mackay
• Joshua Keen
• Justin Smith
• Lou Lynch
• Mike Brown
• Mike Taylor

And of course there are more commentators and critics, including SEO professionals, such as Greg Boser, and Knox, who both seem to be doing quite well and have also offered some SEO insights.

Well, that’s a wrap for February, but with 2 months to go, theres plenty of time for things to change.

This site was spotted on page six for the search term “Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World” this evening, and it got me thinking… what if I were to write a post about the contest and the SEO strategies that are going on, everyday for the next two months. People say that Google loves content, but what if there is lots of content without a lot of links? Can it work…

I honestly don’t know if I will be able to update this blog that often, but I do know that I can’t compete with the “lots of links” strategy, because the currently leading site has team members who can provide things like signature links from 23,000 posts on the Digitalpoint forums. That’s just crazy!

Well, I can think of a few reasons, so let’s do a comparison:

Real Estate Webmasters

62,100 Pages Indexed of Unique Content
459,217 Inbound Links
Created 04-09-2004

GreatestRealEstateAgentInTheWorld.WordPress.Com

27 Pages Indexed of Unique Content
134 Inbound Links
Created 02-18-2008

I’m not sure, but I think that REW wins… and this also provides evidence that my theory may have some merit. The theory being that it may be easier to compete in the contest using a page on my REW blog versus this cool new site that I created. Because today, my contest entry on REW for the Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World is in the rankings at #15 was in the rankings for all of 1 minute… sigh.