I think this would be a fantastic opportunity to compete with one another and share how we were able to accomplish results. I am not talking about a SEO contest with prizes and all that rubbish. I simply think it would be great to have a discussion board where we could compare results on different projects, etc.

Good idea, but don't lose focus on the fact that you are promoting your clients sites as a service to the client, not as part of a competition.

Maybe setting up a standalone project site to use for the competition might be an option though?

Cheers
Ian

I agree with Ian on this. It would be great to have a fun SEO contest that did not include client projects of course. I have some questions about the rules though. What would we do? What would be the rules?

I am thinking that we could go like this:

1. One domain for the project. All other properties for the project could not be owned by the contestant, so for backlinks, etc. everything would have to be completed from scratch.

2. We all select 10 keywords for the project, I think that they would need to be related. In other words we could not go for something like "denver attorney" and then "pink elephants". I think we should go for keywords that are competitive but would not interfere with client projects.

3. Limit to 10 competing SEO's?

4. Blackhat or Whitehat, doesn't matter


What else could we do here?

What would a good time frame be? What would the winner receive? What if everyone provided a domain with at least a PR1 and the winner gets all the domains??

I've got my domain name ready to go for this contest!

One quick thought though - what if someone picks a topic that is extremely competitive in the SERPs, and someone else picks something really easy?

Do we need a guideline / rule on this?

My proposed site is based on holidays / vacations by the way!

Cheers
Ian

I think for this to be uniform we would need to have a set project. So for example, since I don't have a domain for this I would not mind gunning for Holidays / Vacations. Then we set several keywords / phrases, some long tail and some major and we all gun for them. At the end of the day, the domain could be keyword rich or not, doesn't matter. It would be up to the contestant.

I like Nick's idea about pooling the domains and that all domains go to the winner. I think we go for it. I would also add the site into the mix. So winner get's all 80% of all domains and sites along with it and runner up gets the last 20%. The winner would be able to choose the domain and sites they wanted.

Right now would be a good time to be hitting up the holiday stuff so that these sites are set by vacation season. So, I am thinking contest starts Dec. 26 and runs through Apr 1st. Winner is decided on the 1st according to rank for the keywords originally selected.

I think all domains have to be "fresh" to begin with, so clean of all links. What do you guys think?