Nigritude ultramarine, Seraphim Proudleduck, The four required words, preCharge projectnet, loquine glupe, Hommingberger Gepardenforelle, redscowl bluesingsky What are these strange words?

If you know any of these, you probably know about or have even participated in a Search engine optimisation contest.

An SEO contest is an activity awarding prizes that challenge search engine optimization enthusiasts to rank themselves among the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keywords. This type of contest is controversial because it often leads to massive amounts of link spamming as participants try to boost the rankings of their pages by any means available.

The organizing body of an SEO competition may hold the activity without promotion of a product or service in mind; or they may organize a contest in order to market something on the Internet. Participants can showcase their skills and potentially discover and share new techniques for promoting websites.

Do these contests have any merit anymore though? Well, if you participate in one now, the chances are that you will at some point be penalised by google. However, this is what all good SEO's do for their clients on a daily basis anyway. They merely don't publish the fact, or do they?

Gary Green has done just that on his blog, a direct challenge to top the google SERPS for, well his own name, "Gary Green"

Gary really needs a little help, so the incident which helped him was a little bit of good fortune. Lets see what a bit of good fortune would bring Gary…….

It was an incident, Google later said – a mere erroneous zero deeply hidden in the code of the algorithm Google used, triggered at completely improbable set of circumstances, a bug so exotic and rare one could say it practically couldn't even exist. But of course, it did exist. And Gary Green's life would be forever changed by this improbable bug.

When Gary woke up this fateful morning to update his blog (he wanted to talk about how he was getting on with building the new Salmonbones website he was working on)… he already felt something had changed. There were 320 comments to his last entry, which was unsuspiciously titled “Installing Wordpress 2.7” 320 comments were about 320 more than Gary usually got. The blog had been up and running for just over a month, and even he didn’t feel it was especially exciting (mirroring his life, like personal blogs do).

How could he get hundreds of comments on just a single blog entry? And these were real comments, practically spam free, taking apart his grammar, commenting on the fact that he had highlighted a quite already talked about bug with a fix, freely chatting away and just saying Hi. So really, what went wrong? Had he made it to the first page of Digg? For this quantity of visitors, and there surely must have been millions this morning, he wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon or Apple used their start page to roll the drums for him.

Gary checked his mailbox, but it was crammed. Completely full with hundreds of emails, some of them – hmm, this was weird. Some of the emails talked about “PageRank” in the subject line. Gary knew well his little blog, thanks to some avid backlinking he did from other sites he maintained, had a PageRank of 3. “Not too bad” in the eyes of Google’s measuring algorithm, but nothing that would ever rank him especially high. So Gary opened up one of those emails, and then he had this awkward head rush which made him jump to the kitchen for cigarette and coffee.

PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Gary realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. John arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly John checked the rankings for some words Gary wrote in his blog. He mentioned “wordpress”, and boom, his site popped up on Google’s number one spot for this word. Hundreds of millions of people visiting Google, thousands of them entering “wordpress”, hundreds of them being transferred to Gary at any second.

And “wordpress” wasn’t even one of the hot words. In fact it was the mass of words and phrases taken together, like “Pub”, or “Sheffield”, or “dating”, or “singles”, that had the huge impact. Gary, as John knowingly pointed out to him, gained the complete power of the word. Something like instant world control, he jokingly added.

“Whatever you say, people will listen to you. And there will be a lot of people. Don’t tell anyone about this, you are going to get rich. And famous.”

Nothing too bad, as Gary thought, “After all being rich and famous means a lot of money and fame!”.

And three months later indeed Gary was a celebrity. He had a client list on salmonbones.co.uk ten thousand long, he and the three other founder members had floated on the stock exchange, they no longer worked but sub contracted all the web and graphic design out. They lived the life of luxury while watching the money role in.

Gary, slowly and inevitably feeling responsible to say something at least remotely interesting, changed the blog from diary that commented on Salmonbones to commentary on important world events. He didn’t have the insights, it’s not that. In fact you could consider him exceptionally clueless about politics and all. But he did have a way of putting things straight, a no-nonsense, plain real approach of talking. Not a style he invented – it was around in millions of blogs before. It was around when your neighbour started talking in the bus. It was the every-day chat traditional media doesn’t consider polished enough to be worthwhile. But Gary had PageRank 100. And Google did not know about it.

So when Gary talked about Palestine and the Gaza Strip, the President had to give a press meeting. When Gary found that his Operating System was still overly buggy, Bill Gates had to announce to do everything to better help the “average user”. (Gary was mildly annoyed by being considered to be just an average user, so Bill Gates had to call in yet another press conference promising not to think in terms of “average users”.)

In fact when Gary commented on anything happening in the world he found to be somewhat wrong, it got changed within a course of a day or two. Nobody likes bad publicity.

On the other hand – talk about mind control – whenever Gary mentioned a record he bought he liked, it would jump into the Top 10. It would become a world wide hit almost immediately. Not everybody would like the song, but you just had to know what the hype was all about. (Loudon Wainwright III in Top of the Pops. And he didn’t even have a new album out.)

Gary could now end wars, shape products, close shops, invent fashion (the list goes on)… and revamp the life of a generation.

Of course now Gary knew why every celebrity around complains they get too much attention outside. When he walked the mall, girls would snicker. On the street people turned around, pointing. There were camera men outside in the garden. Gary felt like he had to adopt an attitude quickly, something like a rock-star lifestyle, so he would always know what to do and say and walk like. That’s probably why later the talking Gary-doll (Johnel paid him well) uttered clichés like “You know you want to” or “All the world’s a blog” or “Don’t listen to me, listen” or “You are a stranger, my friend”.

The only friend he lost was John. John felt like Gary didn’t have as much time these days as before… before, when Gary would still meet him and Linda for a drink. So John decided to end the charade; he emailed Google. And Google reacted. Gary was not only put down to a PageRank 0, he was completely banned from all rankings. It was like he lost his voice.

Sure, as Gary would later say, he enjoyed celebrity status for some more weeks before the media decided to shift focus. But maybe it was for the better. After all, he didn’t have that much to say, really. So in his journal he continued to write about his nightmares, which admittedly gained a few outlandish colors. He could even find time to meet John and Joann. Knowing he’d be a footnote in future history books sort of made him proud, and well, a bit lazy.

These days mostly Gary wanted to find a nice restaurant to relax. Listen to the music, have a dinner. And whenever someone asked him if he liked the food, or if he liked the music, or – beware – brought up a political issue, Gary would keep awkwardly quiet. Changing the world was a job for others. And today, Gary found a nice restaurant indeed.

That evening someone, somewhere at Google, was laughing. He just put a zero deeply hidden in the algorithm, so exotic and rare it practically didn’t exist. Sophie was in for a surprise…………

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