Everything began on February 13th, with a post from Ent-Arktik on the Seosphere forum. He introduced us the Seocontest2008 contest, as organized by a huge British forum : Ukwebmasterworld.com
Quickly, we have decided to form a team and to participate together. One should know that the Seosphere discussion Board regroups most of the French-talking specialists of this kind of contests.
Our first action was to create a sub-forum, allowing us to discuss privately, about our strategy. Concerning the recruting, any member of the forum was able to join the team. At the end, we were a team of 30 people (yet, in fact we were a lot more, as explained further). Thus, a very big team.
Our tool to participate to the contest ? A simple Wordpress blog, for the multi-user aspect was primordial.

About organization, specific topics have been created : Content, Netlinking and position checkpoints… At the end, we had more than 60 topics, for more than 300 public interventions, and about 1500 private ones. Anyone was able to do the optimizations of his choice. For the said “sensible” optimizations, a requirement to the rest of the team was recommended.
The marking events of the contest
There were a lot of.
First of all, some articles posted on our blog :
* The hacking attempt on our blog
* The Flash game (hunting backlinks)
* The tool to check the position on several datacenters
* The video with a vibrating duck
But also, some articles more “heavy” on content :
* “The Combat of the Thirty” : Presenting the team members.
* Symbol of friendship between peoples : With British and French flags
Another good one ? The final countdown !
The forbidding of using 301 redirections was rough. Many members of the team had launched personal pages just for this. The idea was to do a 301-redirection to our site, few time before the end. But since the organizers forbid that technic, we were sad to ask them not to do it
So, why did we win ?
First of all, we were facing awesome adversaries, for instance the winner to the SEO world championship. Most of them also played in team, and when the first on the SERP obtains help from many other persons also positionned on the Top 10, things become hard enough…
- A good organization : The SEO guy is a lonely person, and has a affirmed personality. Nevertheless, we managed to organized and coordonate ! The fact is that most of the teammates had no personal page, participating to the contest, which was easier for everyone to focus without rear thoughts.
- A short contest: If it has been longer, it may have been difficult to remain mobilized that long on a team.
- A real knowledge share : We did not hesitate to really share our knowledge of contests and SEO (in private, of course
)
- A complete strategy : We attempted to act on most of the criteria followed by the search engines.
- ******* and ***** : Unfortunately, we cannot reveal everything about our strategy and tips.
The ultimate weapon to win Seocontest2008 ?
YOU ! Yes, we asked for a humongous support to people around. It’s hard to imaginated how many people helped us to win. At least a hundred, but maybe more. Entire communities decided to help us. We prefer not to list them, for we’ll forget several of them, surely. But whatever this number of people, we really want to THANK YOU ALL !!! Without you, we don’t know if we could have done this.
Conclusion :
This entire contest will stay on the memory of all the team members as a great souvenir. For most of us, it was the first contest in team, and the experience was so enriching…
We’ll organize on the next weeks a great dinner to celebrate the event. This way, it will be the good moment to finally put a face on the virtual ones who have helped us.
Thanks again !
The Seocontest2008 Seosphere Team