Reasons not to join an SEO Contest

I’m just re-stating what Migs Dennis posted on Migs’ blog earlier — Top 10 reasons why not join the Ituloy Angsulong SEO Contest. Some of them are on the bleeding edge of humor and a few more actually hit the note which I’d like to echo here:

• The amount of time, effort and money you spend on an SEO Contest may not actually compensate for whatever prizes you may win, if (and that’s a big IF) ever you’d win. What are the chances of that?
• Lost of productivity is directly proportional to how eager you want to win the competition. Good thing there’s SEOBunker to do the quick-check for you. (Nice tool, btw, dude!)
• You might end up getting a lot of attention, albeit negative, from SEO gurus all over. And you don’t ever wanna mess with those guys.
• If you’re an SEO Specialist, you’d have to hunt for 101 reasons why some newbie or blogger bested you 3 pages up the Google SERPs.
• You’d be forced to pay a link to some questionable sponsor before stepping into the door.

The last one really hits the sweet spot (as Migs originally points out). What better way to trigger the SE’s red flag than linking to a bad, totally unrelated neighborhood. One might even consider it as accessory to a link spamming.

So, you can still join the contest actually. You may not follow the *required* links and not really qualify but at least you learn something from the exercise.