Asus Laptops Strike Back or How to Overuse Contests for SEO

The PCNews Contest I am part of is closing to an end. Today's chore is talking about an Asus liking of my choosing. As always I have to choose from an Intel Atom or an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. I have written so far at least 4 Asus related articles and I think that by know, my 2 left readers got the idea that I hate netbooks and I'd prefer a regular notebook instead. Nevertheless I went ahead and checked Asus netbooks too and I have gone through Atom and Core 2 Duo specs. And I kept receiving similar tasks.

The whole contest is based on SEO needs of the various sponsors. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization. Or how to rank higher with Google in order for my site to get more exposure. In other words let's say a website is working hard on having a top position, mainly the first page of Google, for certain keywords. Let's look at "Intel Atom" and "Intel Core 2 Duo". Right now Google has only 14,400,000 results showing up when you search for Intel Atom products and 31,900,000 for Intel Core 2 Duo. Out of them 5 are my posts. Will I get on top of the result page for that keyword? Well not exactly! But I have surely contributed to that top position for at least 5 different sponsors of this contest. Multiply this by at least 100 bloggers linking back to a different site every other day with similar keywords and those sites are going to certainly benefit from the search. The strategy behind the whole contest is almost perfect. Besides links for certain keywords, the sites will get their Google Page Rank higher. The higher the bloggers' page rank, the better for the sponsors.

What did they do wrong? Well they failed to give more specific instructions. Sure I wouldn't mind writing 5 different articles for the same products if the articles would be better targeted. If I was a sponsor I would have asked my writers to use specific keywords from my writers. I would have a certain word or phrase link to my main page and then a bunch of exact similar keywords point to some of my most popular products or, why not to my most popular promotions. But by leaving all that up to me, the sponsor looses some exposure. I can link any word to its page but it might not be the word people will search for when looking to buy an Asus laptop. Here's the simplest example. Instead of saying anything linking "Asus Intel Atom" to a specific site, I could use the phrase "read more here" to point to it. Which keyword do you suppose the sponsor wants to be used?

Furthermore the way the contest is made will do less for us as bloggers. Google might see as as potential link sellers as it's not aware of the whole contest thing. But when it sees the recurrent linking to PCNews or to sites that are out of our blogs' niche, we might be loosing some PR ourselves. Who won't certainly loose you ask? Bloggers that write only gadgets related articles. But hey, the show must go on! We'll talk more about SEO techniques later on.

Well anyway, I wrote this lines on a laptop powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. As I said before it's not an Asus, it's a Dell. But if you wanted an Asus, you could always get one for less than $600 and it would pack an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. How you'd do that? Well... Read more here! "Read more here" returns 116,000,000 webpages. Again, which one would you like me to use when linking back to your site sponsor?

(This post is written for the PCNews contest.)

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