Many blogs run blog contests to improve the number of backlinks to their blog. Depending on how you run the contest, you would have different results with reference to how the search engines see you.
Most people will run the blog promotion by writing a contest post within their site and start asking readers to link to that post. Most (if not all) participants will by default give the anchor text of “blog contest” or something in the same meaning and link it to your post.
Negative aspects of badly structured blog contest for newer blogs?
Let’s take a look at this from the search engines point of view.
Your blog has a few backlinks going into some of your articles. Suddenly, there is an article that is attracting a lot of backlinks from everyone else. And the interesting thing about those backlinks is that most of them are saying the interesting article on your blog is about a blog contest. The search engine also notice that this blog contest post is getting the most backlinks compared to the other articles. The search engine might see this article as the pillar article of your site.
If you have a very established blog that has many backlinks coming into your blog’s various posts, then you would probably not face this small challenge.
So how can we structure our blog contest for better SEO?
One of the simple ways of structuring your blog contest to achieve better utilization of the backlinks that you would have would be to disperse the incoming backlinks to your pillar articles.Take for example, instead of asking for a backlink into the contest post, you might want to change the rules a bit and request your reader to read one of your pillar articles and link to it instead with some relevant anchor text . They should then leave a comment in your contest post that they have done so. They may not even have to link to your anchor post if you are doing the promotion via the contest blogs serving the community.
Using this method of dispersion the incoming backlinks to the various articles help to strengthen the “strength” of each pillar article and with the correct use of anchor words, the search engine will co-relate your site to a certain niche based on what keywords are strong in your site.
If you do not have strong pillar articles as yet when you are running your blog contest, you might want your participants to link back to your with your blog’s niche words rather than the word “contest”.
Share with us your experience on your results of holding blog contest.
Do you have any experience to share on the effects on search after you have run a blog contest? Share it with the rest of us either through the comments or you can also write up an article to post on this site.
2 comments ↓
Great post.
I’m actually preparing a contest to celebrate my blogs 2 year anniversary, so this post has really given me a great idea.
Any chance of a post about how to get sponsors?
Glad that the article helped you.
There will definitely be a post on how to get sponsors for your competition coming up in the near future.
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