I was thinking on the lines of a competition for my new top secret project: Shymz which led me to look around for fresh ideas. I found that a lot of sites are running new competitions for various prizes and stuff to be won.
With blog contests becoming a rage all over the blogosphere, I was wondering if it will help you in anyway to increase your statistics online.
By stats, I mainly refer to:
- Google PageRank
- Alexa Rankings
- Technorati
These three are the main factors that determine how much your blog is worth on the internet. Also some other factors like your RSS feed count also matter to a extent. I had a look at a major competition that ran a few months ago at MsDanielle’s Blog. It was a simple linkback competition which had a lot of entrants and had special attention since she won it from JohnChow dot com. This is a long post folks, so get a coffee and join me as I do this case study.
Alexa Data for Ms. Danielle
If you have a closer look at the alexa data, which though is meaningless in most cases, but is useful for spotting trends. There is a initial spike in May which is the time JohnChow announced the winner of his Microsoft Zune contest. This win saw the alexa rankings of the pink blog of Ms. Danielle run uphill.
When things started to slow down a bit, Ms. Danielle announced in June the contest for winning the Zune she won from John who in fact won it from somewhere else! (White Elephant anyone?). The alexa again had its second spike in June and continued its spike as she got mentions in popular blogs including many A-List Bloggers. Then a smaller spike came in as people checked in for the winner who was announced in July.
Okie folks, the contest is over!!! Alexa noted this downfall and it reflected in its rankings which has continued its fall till now. So if you had a look at the rankings now and before the contest, its almost the same. So what did the contest achieve in the long term? Technorati rankings? Pagerank?
Technorati Effects
Lets take the case of Technorati rankings. Though I wanted to keep track of that, I lost track at some point of time. But I am sure it must have brought in a lot of linkbacks in a short period of time, since the Technorati ranking currently stands at about 3k with a authority of 806. But is this rankings good in the long term?
Technorati calculates how many links are pointing at your blog from other blogs (your blog’s ‘authority’) based upon the last 6 months activity. This means that a blog that links to you today will be counted – but in 180 days it will not be counted any more.
Since technorati indexes links only for 180 days, this authority will be gone in a short period until you do another contest or have a solid linkbait. So with that decided, this brings us to pagerank, will a contest help your Google Pagerank?
Pagerank??
Since the update has not happened yet, I cannot say for certain if this will happen or not. But as a SEO learner, I can say it will help. All the links are all permanent and will lie in the blog’s archive forever, which will help Ms. Danielle’s blog in Pagerank and for Search Engine Result Positions (SERPs). Her blog is in the first page as the 9th result out for 1,250,000,000 results for blog site. Pretty impressive! huh?
Conclusion: What does this mean? Is running a contest good for your blog? Some things I noted include:
- Does not help with Alexa, which indirectly means you will not get much of targeted visitors. Instead you will get a bunch of people who are more in interested in the prize than your blog.
- Technorati Rankings will soar, but thats not permanent either.Will be gone in 180 days.
- Pagerank and SERPs. Pagerank should be good. The only thing that stays for sometime? But with the Google dance, your blog can be buried too.
What are your thoughts on running a competition for your blog? Have you done it? What happened? Share in your thoughts and let me know if I missed anything here.
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