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Seraphim proudleduck is a term made up by Salmonbone's Google contest (http://www.salmonbones.co.uk/) (no longer online) to test methods and best approaches for search engine optimization (the process of modifying a web page's contents and links to ensure a high ranking in a search engine). The specific target of interest is Google's search engine.
The Contest
The contest ran from September 1, 2004 to January 1, 2005. Before the competition, Google was showing no results for "seraphim proudleduck," but at the time of the contest ending, over 520,000 results existed for the term.
Three prizes were expected to be awarded for the top positions in a Google.com search done on January 1, 2005 at 1am. As different Google servers are known to show different results, the search was performed from the UK. The winner of the challenge was expected to get 1000 Pounds (second prize was 300 Pounds, third prize was 200 Pounds). A bonus prize -- a PageRank 7 page -- was going to be awarded to the number one position for the phrase in Google Images.
However, in an unexpected turn of events, the contest organizer announced that he has sold SalmonBones.co.uk (http://www.salmonbones.co.uk/), and it is not currently known if any prize will actually be awarded.
Effects of The Contest
Many people consider this kind of modification to be "gaming the system", and it is known that Google regards some kinds of search engine optimization tactics to be illegitimate, and penalizes pages and websites that use these techniques. It is unknown whether Google is likely to take specific action to make this competition moot, given the fact that they took no action against the previous contest entrants.
Weblogs and wikis were being hit by the previous "nigritude ultramarine" competition, and needed to be constantly policed to prevent nigritude ultramarine spam from lowering their signal to noise ratio below acceptable limits. Public sandboxes were especially vulnerable. This method is going to be banned in future contests. Moreover should you come across any entrant to the seraphim proudleduck contest using these methods you should contact the organisers.
See Also
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