Velociroflcoptersaurus – Revisited

This is should really be more aptly called: “How I won the Velociroflcoptersaurus competition”…

Back in December 2008, a rather simplistic competition was begun at Razorfish’s Client Summit by the ever prolific minds of their Australian agency, Amnesia. It was one of those – let’s coin up a bloody word never uttered before and try to prove a point that Google search is ridiculously valuable – ideas.

The concept was already getting old by then, but whatever. The Social folks at Razorfish wanted to prove how much social integrates into search. Fair point, and it certainly did have an effect for a short while as blog posts, linked-in and twitters got first page rankings.

Simply put, ShiftedPixels in Australia killed the competition through a very well timed effort in pure spammy link building. They certainly got the timing right and rightfully won the competition with a #1 ranking for “velociroflcoptersaurus”.

But wait…

Who’s on top a year and a bit later? And who has been #1 consistently for over 8 months?… yours truly…

I wanted to demonstrate that content was king, regardless of the social media driven interrupts that occur. well structured optimized content was always going to win the day. (see my strategy explanation here: http://www.velociroflcoptersaur.com/disclaimer/)

So the point of all this is to provide some closure on the long-term standings, where my site velociroflcoptersaur.com holds rankings #1 & 2 in Google US. That also includes a result for my side experiment in using only webmaster tools to geo-locate a section of the site to Australia (and succeeded in doing so!)

You’ll note that shifted pixels is noticeably absent in Google US at least. (not so in Australia) And further, the amnesiablog did well in retaining the post and holds good standing with its unique content. Finally, there is still some clear evidence on how some social sites have staying power and can contribute to your share of shelf space in search. (Facebook, Linkedin and Flickr all hold well a year later…)

Look at the search result: