As a webmaster you probably already know what a SEO Contest is or you surely came across some of them or even participated in. Some of the major SEO contests organized are the v7ndotcom elursrebmem (by v7n.com), Ambachdotcom, Carcasherdotcom, and more recently the Cpayscom2 Online Casino where the winner gets $10,000 for ranking number one on MSN. Now the big question is whether it is good or bad to organize SEO Contests.

Let’s start with the organizer of the SEO Contest. For the website organizing the competition, it is surely a good thing in terms of marketing as the SEO contest will bring thousands of backlinks in much shorter time that it would take if link building was done normally, that is, directory submissions, article submissions and so on. On the bad side, the website will mostly get tons of unrelated links as many of the website participating don’t know much about the main theme of contest, let’s say the website organizing the competition is about acne and most of the participating website are talking about SEO, these are definitely non related links they will get.

Let’s now come to the participant. For him participating in a SEO contest can do only good since he will try his best to rank for a keyword that has 0 competitions. So in short it is a good way to test his SEO skills and also learning new techniques and improve himself.

When organizing a SEO contest for sure the whole webmaster world knows about it, and thousands of webmasters will participate in the competition resulting in millions of pages created in a short time. Do search engines see this as spamming? Nobody knows… But I personally think that after a competition the participating websites should be deleted since many of them will not be of any value on the web. For example a website talking about SEO to rank for the keyword “acne” is completely useless don’t you think?

To sum up, SEO Contests are both good and bad. But I think it will be a good idea to remove participating websites from the web once the contest is over. Many people may not share the same view but we should also think about the average internet users as not everybody online are webmasters.
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With the actual Google PR update going on many websites are already seeing changes in PR, some good some bad, this update is probably not like the last one where only "new" websites benefited.

You can check your PR on all google datacenters with these tools:
http://livepr.raketforskning.com/ which checks on 69 sources
or this one
http://www.rankalert.net/index.php which gathers data from 72 google datacenters

You might have noticed that I didn't mention any PR prediction tool, well only Big G has the last word about PR and all the prediction tools you can find are not based on the actual google algo, so better not waste your time with them.

A great place to submit your article is SubmitContent, when you submit your article to this directory, it is also submitted to a network of 1500 directories!
Notice that Submit Content is a partner of isnare.com, this means you are sure to get quality links.

Good luck with your submissions.

I came across this recently and found it very helpful to check backlinks rapidly
http://www.shoemoney.com/siteinfo.php
here's what it looks like

I was using some other online tools to check backlinks but I found this tool from Shoemoney very useful, what's nice is that it checks backlinks from all the mayor search engines, no need to check one by one.
(Most of my backlinks are from my forum signatures :) I never SEOed (don't know if this term exists) my blog)

Another tool that I found very interesting is this one
http://www.shoemoney.com/serps.php
Result will look like this
Good tool to check your ranking on all these SE's at same time, cool I didn't know I was #1 on msn for the keywords "seo secrets"

These results are from 26.04.04, today I checked again, seems I no more in top 100 on Altavista, some days back I was even on yahoo... Anyways I think am doing well (LOL) for a blog that has never been SEOed.

This is a question I've heard more than a thousand times, in all webmaster forums there should be a question about this. We all know that it's not very easy to get listed there, it all depends on the editors. Some do their job faster than the others. So, to get listed in DMOZ can take you from 4-5 minutes to 4-5 years! I know this sounds incredible but I've got proof recently on Digitalpoint forum, this thread "How to get submitted" will answer your question.

We all give much importance to DMOZ as it's one of the main directories on the internet, but editors must improve else in some years webmasters will not give much importance to that directory.

I've also seen that DMOZ listing increases a domain value, not quite sure why... is it because DMOZ has PR10? Does that boost your PR in any way? Well I don't think so, at the last PR update many websites have got high PR even with no backlinks!