// Internet Duct Tape

Building PageRank Through Bribery

Posted in Marketing and Promotion, Technology by engtech on July 23, 2006

Now this I think is an interesting idea. You see companies do this all the time with contests, so why not individual bloggers? A blogger in Italy is giving away a 60 GB Video iPod to a person at random who links to his blog between now and August 4th.
It should be interesting to see how long it until this really takes off. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a lot of incoming links. I’m sure that it will, as a free iPod seems to be the price point for most people to sell their own mother. In the long term this will probably be a much cheaper method of generating word of mouth advertising than a real ad campaign. It really seems that generating organic word of mouth campaigns is taking off as a way of dealing with the “new media”.
What’s interesting about Lotek’s contest is the lack of boilerplate to protect the contest:

  • You could provide a link, but make it rel=”nofollow” so that it doesn’t increase the search engine ranking. This would be a way of entering the contest without contributing to increasing his PageRank.
  • No definition of what can be linked from. Bookmarking in del.icio.us is considered a valid entry. Posting a link in a forum could be considered a valid entry.

I’ve heard of link exchange bribery before (that is the fundamental principle of webrings), but I think this is the first time I’ve heard of a non-corporate blogger creating a contest to promote their site. Leave a comment if you know of any other examples.

>> Lotek » Blog Archive » Contest – I give away as a gift my black iPod Video 60GB for a link

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  1. //engtech » Building an Audience or “How I Learned to Stop Posting Inane Crap and Love the Blog” said, on July 23, 2006 at 7:39 pm

    [...] Building PageRank Through Bribery [...]

  2. engtech said, on July 30, 2006 at 4:59 am

    I say interesting in the first sentence of every paragraph in this post.

    Interesting.

  3. Get a Free iPod for gaming del.icio.us (link bribery) « //engtech said, on November 02, 2006 at 8:29 pm

    [...] This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this, but someone else is giving away free iPods to get links. When the Italian dude did it earlier, he only got 20 links — which isn’t very hard to get. The guys at mostlysavingmoney.com are doing a much better job. The contest ends on November 22nd, 2006 and they are giving away 3 iPods. [...]

  4. kevin said, on December 18, 2006 at 10:30 am

    an ipod is a good prize dont laugh!!!

  5. Get a Free iPod for gaming del.icio.us (link bribery) « Internet Duct Tape said, on July 20, 2007 at 2:31 am

    [...] a Free iPod for gaming del.icio.us (link bribery) This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this, but someone else is giving away free iPods to get links. When the Italian dude did it earlier, he [...]

  6. Paanchajanyadharaaya said, on February 06, 2009 at 12:12 pm

    thanks !! very helpful post!

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