Since my last post, the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ, my entry in the SEO contest has been indexed by Google and is now showing up in the results. Unlike the hundreds of other pages out there, this is one of a handful that are actually intended to be interesting. It’s also one of the few that’s not using every dirty, black hat SEO trick in the book to try to cheat the Google rankings. No parasitic link farms, no referrer spamming, no keyword spamming, no page cloaking or any of those other things evil SEOs do to replace real Google search results with spam. Suprisingly, my page made it into the top 20 results anyway and is now bouncing around between position 9 and 12.

That makes me happy mostly because it means Google must be doing a very good job at resisting the SEO attacks so far if a purely information page is ranking that high. I have tried to optimize the page in the sense that it contains validated XHTML/CSS, minimal graphics, and correctly uses the meta description and keyword tags. And I seem to be getting some links to it from other sites, though nowhere near the thousands of links the SEO people are creating to their sites from link farms. Google showed 32k results this morning. There are only about 200-300 contestants so the rest of those must be sites linking to the contestants. I’ve probably got no more than 20 links to my page at present. (feel free to help me out by adding one, if you’d like!)

One thing that I found surprising is how far some of the SEO experts are willing to go to pump up their pages. Within two hours of my site being picked and shown in the Google results, someone filed a Google spam report against it. After doing some searches on SEO discussion forums, I discovered this is standard operating procedure for some SEOs. They file spam reports against any sites close to or higher than theirs in the Google results in the hope that Google will pull their competitor’s site from the database.