For many months now a group of friends and co-workers of mine have had this little ranking game going on with a particular keyword in Google. The objective was to out rank one another and stay at the top of Google’s SERPs for as long as
possible.

Good old Matt Cutts rocked our world on Thursday when we discovered one of his posts sitting at the top of our little competition. Our little side competition suddenly became much more interesting. Now instead of out performing one another we will have to set our scope on beating Matt Cutts in a game he robably doesn’t even know he has interrupted at the time of this posts writing.

I’ll be the first to admit that not all of our tactics to game one another have been all that kosher but at least in my case I figured it was a harmless term that very few people actually search for.

From blog category names to creative usage of titles and even creating the post with a keyword rich name and then renaming it so it wouldn’t be so obvious at first; we have pretty much done it all just to game one another.

All four of us involved in this little content writing competition have had our fair jokes about how Aaron Wall virtually made the term “SEO Book” popular. Before he came into the picture I think I read somewhere that it wasn’t a widely searched term. (If anyone reading this knows a link to an article that talks about that i’d appreciate you letting me know so I can reference it). Our little posse of small time bloggers figured that just maybe we’d make our term a big success like Aaron has. Well Matt; it looks like we now have a lot to work to do.

As far as I know only two of us have seen Matt show up at the top for our term so this post is somewhat of a head start for me but I think I will be giving the advice that we all should work not only towards out ranking one another but that each of us should work on pushing Matt down just for the added thrill… That is IF Matt allows us to have our fun without getting creative with his Super human Google Powers.

By now I’ve probably triggered a few Google Alerts. Somewhat purposeful and somewhat accidental I assure you. However it is what it is and I’m sure that Aaron Wall and Matt Cutts have probably browsed this post by now or at least have been informed that their names were brought up in one way or another.

Let me introduce the game players so that everyone knows who all might be involved in this little game of ours that has taken a serious interesting turn of events.

Zak Nicola - Zak happens to have some of the most interesting posts out of all of us simply because they aren’t all related to Internet Marketing or SEO related topics. He has a page or two on the ever so popular cat frenzy that seems to keep everyone occupied and let’s not forget Zak in drag! This very sexy picture of Zak Nicola got us laughing and smiling for a long time.

Jeremy Rivera - Jeremy is to blame for this competition. He is fairly new to Internet marketing in general and prior to that he was a Customer Support Supervisor. He got nosey and started asking questions one day and never stopped. It was a surprise to us all when the company we all work for decided that Jeremy deserved to be the Marketing Manager.

Jeremy originally ranked for this keyword term prior to his promotion. We all thought that it would be funny (and easy) to push his blog down on our targeted keyword so set out to write a lot of content (some useful, some not) around the topic. So the game began and has gone on for several months now.

Shirley Tipsy - Many people might recall Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2006. There were two ladies who attended the conference that wore “Matt Cutts is a God” and “Matt Cutts Makes Me Google” T-shirts. Needless to say; to this day Shirley Tipsy still Googles over Matt Cutts. I was unfortunately not brave enough to wear any of those shirts during that trip so I didn’t go down as the guy wearing a “Matt Cutts Loves Me” T-shirt or whatever Shirley had planned for me.

Shirley Tipsy is also known as Audrey and she is our former Marketing Manager. She still works for the same company but now she is in charge of our company site and not our client sites. She has been involved in this game since the beginning but has been an even bigger game player in the SEO industry for many many years.

Matt Cutts Makes Me Google

(Compliments of http://www.webuildpages.com/)

John Jones - That’s me! Jeremy first showed off his new blog to me via instant message at work one day. Later that evening at home he sent me another instant message letting me know that he was ranking for a keyword that looked rather impressive at first.

It is always easier to write about other people yet it is always easier to speak highly of oneself; why is that? I’m not exactly sure what to say except that I’ve been honored to work with the people I’ve worked with. I’m also very happy to have been contacted by people like Rand Fishkin and Rebecca Kelley for very small and non important issues all the way up to Barry Schwartz aka Rustybrick
over at Search Engine Round Table right around the time that Google launched their Adwords Print Campaign capability.

So now that I’ve introduced the players of this game I’ll tell you that the targeted keyword is “Content Writing Advice“. Many posts and many links have been purposefully established just to target and rank for this keyword term.

Zak probably has one of the best posts out of the four of us while my original post is probably the absolute worse out of the bunch. Now that Matt and others may be taking a small interest in this little game of ours though I hope that we will all be able to step it up a notch and show that we really truly deserve those top positions instead of Matt’s post on, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love“.

John Jones

- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing

Update 3/7/08 4:18am: For the record, Matt has always had a ranking
for this keyword term; he simply has never been number one for it. I should have
taken periodic screenshots and certainly a screenshot for last night. This morning
my obsessive compulsive self checked CWA (Content Writing Advice) and Matt is
no longer at the top again. Possible Google fluke last night or maybe this morning
but I still think this will be a fun addition to our competition to follow through
on.

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