SEO Philippines

The SEO Philippines awards ceremony went off with the only hitch being the wireless access supposedly provided by Pier 1, the signal was just too weak to reach the 3rd floor to establish a reliable connection. Fortunately, my PLDT WeRoam card had just enough signal in typhoon ravaged Manila to allow Marc to pull up the results from www.google.com.ph at precisely 8:00 PM, Manila time. (Note that the WeRoam card was VERY slow, especially as I had the strongest signal on the card I had ever had. I suspect that the preformance was due to typhoon related issues.)

I was able to make a movie of most of the awards ceremony, at 640×480 resolution, 250 MB, features the back of Mike Lopez’s head in a few spots.

One thing I would like to point out is that the actual SERPs for “isulong seoph” and “allinanchor: isulong seoph” are identical though the first 20 places. While regular SERPs and allinanchor returns for the same keyterm largely coincide they do not always. In this case, the site with the most “isulong seoph” in anchor text links was #1, the site with the 2nd most was #2, the site with third most was #3 and on and so forth all the way through the first 20 top-ranked sites.

The lesson to be learned here is that linking is still king; he with the most links wins, and everyone else falls in line in the rankings according to how many links they have with that particular anchor text. Now, that’s not always true, age of a domain and linking patterns over time also have a place in the rankings, but not in this case since all the domains created for this contest had very similar beginnings. TrustRank probably did not come heavily into play either, as all these sites were probably in the same ballpark on that. Also, on-page SEO was not a major factor in the results, as all the top finishers were adequately on-page SEO’d, and on-page SEO only accounts for perhaps 20% of your ranking anyway.

Thus, all things being the same, age of domain, on-page SEO, level of trust, etc, the one with the most links wins. I found it quite refreshing to see such a resounding example of this.

This also means that there was no secret to ranking #1 in the contest. The guy with the most links with “isulong seoph” in the anchor text won the contest, and the guy with the 2nd most came in #2, and right on down the line like dominos.

If another contest was done, seeing that the winning methology was so clearly defined in the allinanchor results in this contest, might the next competion be better off designed and/or judged differently?

And the winners are… Two of the top 10 finishers did not make the show, but the other eight are here. That’s Mr. SEO himself, Marc Macalua on the far left who will be attending Pubcon in Las Vegas this coming November, and center back, in the red shirt is Boris Kerbikov the SQL Server King of The Philippines, and the primary sponsor of the event (the one who put up most of the prize money). I can name a few of the winners, but not all so I won’t name any of them out of a sense of fairness.

Here’s a pic of just some of the 60+ people who attended.

My SEO Philippines closest friends, Marc Macalua, Benj Arriola, and Mike Lopez. Benj flew back from San Diego to attend the event, but I think that was just an excuse for him to spend some overdue catch up time with his lovely wife, who graciously acted as our personal hostess and made Marissa and myself feel very welcome at the awards ceremony.

Isulong SEOph Photo Gallery
For other details and photos from others, see:

• Jozzua
• Major
• Christine
• Yuga
• Mike Abundo
  
• Anton

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under SEO Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.