What the hell is Yoshirolla Kilomantra?

Who cares, it's funny!

Actually "Yoshirolla Kilomantra" does have a meaning, well, sort of. It has meaning due to the sum of its parts, as whacky as the sum may seem.

If you were to ask Dave Hamel what it means, he'd probably show you the explanation for what Yoshirolla Kilomantra means but I think I'll cheat and save you the trouble of having to go there to find out.

Yoshirolla Kilomantra is "an anthropomorphic dinosaur who attempts to bring the metric system to Missouri to bring enlightenment and compassion".

There, that explains everything, no?

Ok, so it doesn't explain much of anything at all so it seems you'd be better off to go to Dave's competition entry and check it out.

What's wrong with most SEO competitions?

Reality check!

The purpose of SEO is not, contrary to popular belief, to only get a site or page top rankings for a set of keywords.

Read that again, slowly, I can already see you shaking your head wondering what I have been drinking but unfortunately most people forget the ultimate purpose of SEO which is to get a site or page ranking well for keywords that will bring traffic leading to conversions or sales.

Ranking by itself, worthless. Ranking and traffic with no sales or other types of conversions, less than worthless because you have to pay for all the traffic but which traffic is bringing you no benefit. Only until sales or whatever other conversion goals are being reached does SEO begin to pay off.

Any SEO undertaken with the ultimate goal being to get some keywords at the top of some lists is not worth the investment of your time.

Beyond that, what is the benefit of ranking high for a given keyword today or even for 6 months from today only to have one's entire site deep sixed because one's methods were not quite kosher?

There will be those that say that even that 6 months is better than nothing but it doesn't have to be everything now, only to lose it all later.

So, an SEO competition that only runs for a few months opens the door to all manner of blackhat techniques that are likely not to be discovered for quite some time after the competition has closed and the winners declared.

Open competition is no competition

Recently I came across an SEO competition only because one of the competitors spammed one of the forums I participate it. It just so happened to be Google's Webmaster Help Forum which might not have been the smartest of things to do but in any event, I went to the home site of that competition and enquired about the rules regarding the use of spam and the response was that they could not control it or know for sure who may have originated any given spam so they had no rule about it.

I guess their inability to determine the actual source of any given spam attempt is understandable but what does that say about the contest itself?

Screwing it up for the real sites.

Some SEO competitions, the one I just mentioned being a prime example, use actual words that already exist in the various search engines.

While that may be a good test of one's abilities in a natural setting, a competition is not a natural setting and since more often than not, sites that only existed for the competition likely will edge out real sites that people may have been working on for a considerable length of time, what happens to the sites that get edged out and likely have actual higher quality content without all the SEO tricks?

Then, if the competition sites are left up, they often aren't maintained, as there is no longer any motivation and even if they are taken down, unless one makes sure all references are removed from the search indexes, which isn't entirely possible across all search engines, 404'd pages will continue to haunt the indexes for some time to come.

What's good about private SEO competitions?

They're fun!

A group of people who either work together or know each other well can have a chance to "play" with what is often something that can make or break some businesses.

Since there is much less pressure, from almost all directions, competitors can go wild with their content and be much more creative than they might normally otherwise. They don't necessarily have to stick to a "script" dictated by business norms or other business requirements so sometimes it is the wildest and more unorthodox content that win

They are environmental friendly

Most private competitions I have seen have used made up words that although components of the word or words may be actual words, their combination is something one will never run into in the "wild". In the particular case of the SEO competition I am writing about, "Yoshirolla Kilomantra", whether the sites or pages are left up or taken down after the competition is over, other sites will not be effected to any great extent.

That said though, as soon as the Yoshirolla Kilomantra competition is over, if Dave takes down his page, he'll have just broken a link on my site! But I'll get over it.

They are less prone to cheating

Although it is always possible that cheating will take place even in private competitions, the motivations for cheating will be reduced as a group of people who know each other are much less likely to try to cheat each other than people from wide and varied backgrounds that never have and likely never will meet each other or come across each other ever again except for that one competition.

Hot off the presses!

One thing I am especially liking about the Yoshirolla Kilomantra SEO competition is that it seems that since the terms targeted are totally made up, not only can and do people create their own meanings for the terms and get as wacky as they want, they can also create totally different types of content and sites making the whole thing all that much more entertaining.

A Yoshirolla Kilomantra by any other name,,,

Here are some of my favorites :

From the page I already mentioned, Dave Hamel's Yoshirolla Kilomantra "an anthropomorphic dinosaur who attempts to bring the metric system to Missouri to bring enlightenment and compassion".
Lisa's Yoshirolla Kilomantr's JPop Star fan page may be one of my favorite concepts. In it, Lisa has created a ficticious Japanese Pop Idol singer giving her biographcial data, a song list and even a face, well, at least part of a face.
Something completely different, Mike Tighe's Yoshirolla Kilomantra blow by blow and up to the minute, or at least up to the day or three reporting on late breaking Yoshirolla Kilomantra events as they happen is a rather ingenious way to indirectly create a buzz around what is going on. Lately blogs have become a more and more important factor in marketing everything from the latest computer tech to the easiest to clean baby diapers. It will be interesting to see how the watcher is watched by the search engines!