SEOKanzler
SEOKanzler (English literally SEO Chancellor) is an SEO contest that was held in 2013 for the first time for two countries. The winner was the one who ranked first in both the google.de and google.at SERPs at the end of the contest with the keyword “seokanzler.”
Organizer
The SEOKanzler contest was launched by the organizers of two of the most famous SEO conferences, the SEOkomm in Salzburg and the SEO DAY in Cologne. The event dates of the conferences were also the end date of the contest. The winners were determined and honored live during the conferences.
Basic information on the SEOKanzler-Contest
The competition started on October 7, 2013 at 10 am. From this point in time, the participants had a deadline of October 16, 2013 (Germany) or November 22, 2013 (Austria) to reach the best ranking in the Google SERPs. The specified keyword for which a ranking was to be reached was “seokanzler.” The competition was established for google.de and google.at, so that there were, in principle, two rounds of the competition. Participants were allowed to use every conceivable strategy to get an organic ranking in the top 10. Paid top positions via Google AdWords were excluded. The methods used included massive link building during the contest, publishing news for Google News, posting images, and even keyword spamming. Webpages that made it to the top 10 places at the end of the competition in the SERPs received attractive prizes.
The result of the contest in Austria was rather interesting. One participant occupied five positions in the organic search results of google.at.
The prices
The organizers of the SEO DAY and the SEOkomm were able to attract various well-known sponsors for the prizes. For example, the first-place winners for google.de and google.at were rewarded with three-month memberships to different SEO service providers (e.g. backlink tools, SEO analysis tools, text service providers), tickets for various conferences and non-cash prizes. Those who placed 2nd to 10th received an SEO Day or SEOkomm ticket for 2014, a trophy or a medal, a certificate and a contest T-shirt.
Relevance to search engine optimization
SEO contests are organized regularly in the field of search engine optimization. The first was the contest for the keyword “Hommingberger Gepardenforelle” (Hommingberger cheetah trout) in 2005. The SEOKanzler contest enjoyed a lot of attention because of its connection to the two specialist conferences. It was also the first competition to be held simultaneously in two countries and two different Google indexes. The organizers hoped to gain interesting insights about the possibly different handling of strategies in the German and Austrian Google index. At the same time, every SEO contest offers the possibility to exhaust the limits of search engine optimization. Manual measures or loss of ranking are only important for participants in the competition. After that they do not matter anymore. However, the lessons learned from such SEO competitions are often subject to reservation, as the optimizations generally apply to a limited period of time. General SEO tips therefore cannot be derived from a contest. As the website of the second place in Austria shows, the fun factor is an important driving force for any competition among SEOs.