After participating in the SEO contest Raiola sends and not the panda , I want to explain the whole process and the strategy I followed to position myself in Google with this keyword.
This month has been a real madness.
I participated in this contest and although halfway I "surrendered" for the competition that was there, the last week I realized that I still had options.
Do you want to know how the contest and the SEO strategy that I have followed have ended?
Keep reading!
SEO contest Raiola sends and not the panda
On June 1st Dean Romero from blogger3cero.com and David Ayala from soywebmaster.com launched an SEO contest sponsored by Raiola Networks.
In this contest you would be given a prize of € 5,000 in cash to appear first in google.es with the keyword "Raiola sends and not the panda".
I thought it was a good idea to participate in this contest for three reasons:
- Last year I participated in the Adsensei SEO contest and it was really fun.
- It is a good way to measure your qualities to position yourself by comparing yourself with hundreds of SEOs from all over Spain, even from abroad.
- Let's be honest, nobody is bitter sweet. € 5,000 prize money would have come for me.
I read Dean's post about the contest on June 2, when some had already begun to position their pages with the chosen keyword. This did not bother me at all, because the contest was going to last 25 days, so there was no need to hurry.
My strategy in the SEO contest
That same day I wrote a post and forced indexing with Google Webmaster Tools . This is the post I published for the contest: Raiola sends and not the panda .
Instantly, my post was positioned on the first page of Google in 5th or 6th position.
Nor did I go crazy since it was only the second day of the contest and many contestants were still to appear.
Optimize SEO Onpage to the maximum
My initial strategy was to write a post of about 700 words, optimizing the SEO Onpage, including the keyword:
- In the title of the post.
- And leave ur item.
- In the meta description (with Yoast SEO plugin).
- In the first paragraph of the post putting it in bold.
- Several times in the content.
- In several titles and subtitles H2 and H3.
- In the alt attribute of the images.
Use the authority of my domain in front of a new EMD domain
As soon as I learned about the SEO contest, I went to Godaddy to see what domains were available with the keyword Raiola sends and not the panda.
They were practically all caught!
Some contestants had been faster than Lucky Luke 
This did not bother me much either, since I would have to have a very aggressive SEO strategy to win the contest in just 25 days with a new domain that has no authority.
I preferred to take advantage of the authority that my blog already has to position a post in the contest.
This was a wise decision since of the first 20 positions, I think only 1 or 2 have been EMD domains.
Hacer Linkbuilding
I started creating some external links with the anchor text "Raiola sends and not the panda" to the post from several pages with authority, profiles in social networks and some blog posts of free platforms.
If I wanted to win this contest I had to get good links since it was clear that with so much SEO participating, there would be very aggressive linkbuilding strategies.
I asked for help from some famous bloggers that I know with authority blogs, to see if they would do me the favor of linking me during the contest, but it took me a long time to do it, and most of them had already been asked dozens of people.
Second week: Abandon the contest
This was a serious mistake that I made and that could hurt me, although you never know.
After talking to a friend who has an SEO agency in Murcia, he told me that he had learned that many agencies throughout Spain were participating, working to appear at the last minute and position themselves among the first.
Something quite true as from the second week began to appear new contestants and my post fell to the seventh page of Google.
Here I took away all the illusion of winning this SEO contest.
Fourth week: There are still hopes
As I say, from the fall I suffered, I decided to leave the contest, but when there was only a week left until the end of the contest, one of the participants contacted me offering to join several participants who were going to join forces to point all of them to one single page and win by distributing the prize.
He told me he was contacting all the participants who were in the first 20 positions.
The first 20 positions? ... if my post is lost in limbo ...
I checked the ranking of the contest and to my surprise, my post was positioned in the last positions of the second page.
There were still hopes!
With a bit of luck and a lot of work, maybe I could climb positions to get into the top 10 positions.
I decided to start working again.
Create internal links from the most authoritative pages of my blog
Little by little I was linking the post with the exact anchor text from the posts and pages of my blog with greater authority and that more visits were received.
I also published in the blog a couple of pages talking about Raiola and the panda and linking the post with the one that competed from them.
Generate web traffic towards the post
On the one hand, I bought web traffic for several days so that the post received visits constantly.
As I said, I also linked the post from the posts on my blog that receive the most web traffic to generate more visits to the post.
I also sent an email to my subscribers, asking them to visit the post and also to share it on the networks.
Fresh content
Only 4 or 5 days were left to finish the contest and we had to give everything.
Each day I edited the post adding new content (200 or 300 words at a time). Google likes pages that are refreshed and updated.
After doing it I went back to "force" Google with Google Webmaster Tools so that it would go to review my post and check if the post suffered any change in positioning.
At this point I had managed to gain positions and I wasalready between 10th and 12th position in the ranking.
New request for help from my subscribers
I sent a new mail to my subscribers again, this time asking them to search for the keyword "Raiola sends and not the panda" in Google and look for my post to click on it. In this way I was improving the CTR so that Google would raise me in the ranking.
Here I also had the help of some friends and family.
+ linkbuilding, and the good
Only 3 days left to finish the contest and was in 9th position.
At this point many contestants had decided to leave and were dedicating themselves to helping acquaintances or friends.
This is what my friend from the SEO agency did. He contacted me telling me if he wanted to help me and both he and a colleague put a redirection 301 from the pages with which they had competed.
I also missed mentioning that a few days before I also used this technique with a couple of expired authority domains that I bought.
All this helped me to climb to the 6th / 7th position.
I could'nt believe it!
I was in the top six in the contest and there were only 2 days to finish the contest.
Last day of the contest ... total loss!
On June 25, the day on which the contest ended, I get up at 8 in the morning and see the panorama.
My website is dancing between positions 6 and 9 of the first page in Google.
This is where I really screwed up.
I knew I had to do something extreme to move up and this was what hurt me.
I thought if I changed the title of the post for a very flashy or funny title, all those who searched for that day on the first page of Google (which would be many since there are only hours left to finish the contest) would be fixed in my post.
Also with the Yoast SEO plugin the post title for "Raiola sends and not the panda. Pablo Iglesias is a cousin of Donald Trump. "
This was the greatest stupidity I could commit.
When making this change, the post went down to the second page of Google ... and there was only a two or three hours to finish the contest.
I changed it again quickly but I did not have time for recovery.
The contest ended at 12.00 and my blog was in the position number 19.
The winner of the contest was Omar de la Fuente de haciaelautoempleo.com
End of the contest
What would have happened if I did not make this change?
Possibly he would have finished in the top 10.
Would I have won the contest?
I'm sure not, because those who were in the first 4 or 5 positions were really strong, although I would have loved to appear in the top 10.
For this reason, the contest has left me with a bit bittersweet taste.
On the one hand happy to know that I have been able to be among the top 10 almost to the end (knowing that SEO experts and SEO agencies from all over the country have participated), and on the other, with the anger of having screwed it in this way few hours to finish the contest.
I am also happy to see that the winner (Omar) has been someone who has used a strategy similar to mine. A blogger who although it is true that he has used SEO techniques, has focused on content marketing to win this contest.
I can only congratulate Omar and thank all the friends, acquaintances and subscribers who have given me a hand during the contest, and of course my friend Pedro and his partner for giving me a good push at the end of the contest.
If you want to know the strategies that have been used by those who have better positioned in this contest and also Omar, I recommend you read this post: The day that blogging beat the SEO .
