Busby SEO Test or Busby SEO SPAM Test

I’ve been seeing more and more on the Busby SEO Test, and no I’m not trying to rank or win for it with this post. SEO contests in general are good for the industry, but I’m seeing how badly this one has gotten out of control with spam of all sorts. You can see the results of who’s on top at this moment in time, and just from analyzing the backlinks of the top people you can clearly see the comment spam tactics at play. This blog itself has got a lot of (pardon my french) shitty comments from contestants with the anchor text in place, and over at my buddy Joel Drapper’s blog I just notice one as well which got me digging more into the contest.So lets take a quick look into the top “performers” for the challenge, but keep in mind some of my data is from Google Canada, so depending on what data center you’re looking from it might be a little different.

I used two different tools to analyze the backlinks of the first two listed there, Yahoo Site Explorer and Backlink Watch. It took me no longer than a few minutes to sell all the blog comments these contestants have used, as well a bunch of other link spamming on sites such as DeviantArt. Now the way these contestants have used questionable tactics is not something you’d want to do for a client, or even for your own site. In the long run Google will catch onto this but for now there’s no doubt that anchor text is still the number one way to rank.

So go ahead and check out some of the contestants links from DeviantArt, blog comments and link exchanges. The comments left behind on blogs are the usualy one liners “thanks for the great information” which defeats the whole purpose of commenting on blogs, and is now a form of spam. This kind of link building gives us all a bad name.

So without getting too nasty or diving in any more into this silly contest what are your thoughts? Am I being rude and unfair? Have you been spammed by a contestant and want to vent? There is a positive and that is the example and real world results you can see from link building, good or bad.