The Last Word on Dave Pasternack

Posted by Greg on March 1st, 2007

OK, the little contest is over. At 12:00 pm Eastern time, Aaron’s data center showed a page from the James Beard Foundation in the #1 spot. Apparently, most other data centers showed my page in the #1 spot, but the data center I connected to here in SoCal showed the same as Aaron’s.

In the last couple of hours, it looks like my page moved to the top at all data centers, but it wasn’t #1 on Aaron’s at the right time, so I’m fine with his decision. (Aaron has made a $1,000.00 donation to the James Beard Foundation)

So what have we learned? (Other than the obvious that SEO contests are stupid)

Here’s what I hope you’ve learned:

1.Controlling the flow of link juice isn’t an exact science.

Although, if you have a solid understanding of how a search engine handles various types of redirection, and you also understand how different types of sites/domains respond to redirection, you can actually predict within a great deal of certainty what will happen and how long it will take.

I got into the contest 8 days ago with a specific plan designed to place my page into the #1 spot within 12 hours of the deadline. We (yes, there was some teamwork involved) came within an hour or two of hitting that mark. The second part of the plan was to increase the visibility of Chef Pasternack pages. I think we also did an excellent job of that.

2. The “defense of an innocent by-stander” card is much better link bait than either the “charity card”, or the “defend our side” card.

Although both Todd and Michael contributed their juice to my page, (which clearly helped secure the top spot) I didn’t have to ask them to do it. They volunteered. And several other sites who probably wouldn’t have contributed any juice to the competition linked to the page as well. And in addition to linking to my page several sites also contributed links to the real Dave Pasternack content, which inturn had a huge impact on the overall SERPS.

When I wrote the original post, 8 days ago, the #1 listing for “Dave Pasternack Recipe” was a post from Gray Hat News. Now it’s really a recipe from Chef Pasternack. The SERP isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s much better than it was.

So now what?

For me personally, I can say without hesitation that this is the last time I’m going to waste whitespace on Did-it Dave. The only thing left to do now is get to work cleaning up the mess this contest has created. By this time next week, my contest entry will be gone from the SERPS. I am going to donate all its juice to Chef Pasternack. And I hope everyone else who participated will do the same.

If you are unsure which page you should redirect your contest entry to, try any of these pages:

Or, if you don’t find one you like there, try looking through this Dave Pasternack SERP.And if you happen to run your site on Wordpress, but aren’t sure how to setup a 301 redirect, feel free to download and install our redirection plugin. Just unzip it, upload both files to your plugin directory and then activate it. Once it’s turned on, you can just select the page you want to redirect and type in where you want it to go.

After you have the redirect in place, if you plan on being in New York for SES in April and you would like to join myself and a few of my good snake oil salesman SEO friends for dinner at Esca, drop me an email with a link to your 301 and I’ll add you to the list.

Work

Comments

2 Responses to “ The Last Word on Dave Pasternack ”

  1. localmn on March 1st, 2007 10:57 pm

    Outside of SEO contests being silly, I’ve learned that the real DP has enough clout to have a top result, just like before the “contest” started.

    Kudos to redirecting results to the real DP, and to Aaron for donating the 1k to the real winner.

    Enjoy ESCA in NYC.

  2. Brian Mark on March 3rd, 2007 12:36 pm

    Let me know when you’re going… I’ll pay my own way. The only blog I posted anything (links, etc.) on was on blogger, so a 301 isn’t going to work out.

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