Mark W. Shead

Mr. Gary Lee is running another contest at his site where he writes about internet marketing. (Previously I entered his workspace photo and was dubbed the “smallest workspace” for the photo of my work area while we were in Mexico.)

He is giving away a free iphone. It is a pretty expensive prize, so I wonder if he will get enough entries to really make it worth while for him.  What he gets out of it is links back to several of his sites with his desired keywords.  So to enter the contest you have to link to BunkersParadise.com with “golf equipment” and to PinkDeals.net with “free online coupon“.

I wonder how effective this will be.  On one hand, if the contest really takes off, he may get a bunch of links.  On the other hand, the links are going to look pretty unnatural to Google.  Lets say Google looks at his golf site and figures out that it is about golf, then it looks at his coupon site and decides it is about coupons.  When Google suddenly sees that all of the pages linking to the golf site also link to the coupon site it seems like it would set off some warning bells that the links don’t make sense and are somehow being artificially related to each other.

Gary is running the contest for about 1.5 months.  It will be interesting to see what type of response he is able to motivate with an iPhone as the prize.  It motivated me to enter.