Okay, some of you know that I’ve been managing the ProBlogger 3rd Birthday Bash Giveaway. Today, our first giveaway required readers to post in the comments section of that one post, “I LOVE SEO!”

Well, aside from the astounding 750+ comments we received, and apart from the first 200 of them happening within the first 70 minutes of launch, something truly amazing happened.

That post got ranked #7 in Google for the phrase within 20 minutes!

(click on thumbnail to view full size image)

Now before you go crying “Google Bombers!” at us, please understand a few things:

• Neither Darren or myself were intending for this to happen by requiring people to comment using that term. I actually didn’t think anything of it, and neither did he, other than that it gave entrants an explicit “task” to qualify for the prize, and that it would help us search for valid entries that had gotten caught up in Akismet’s spam filters.
• The effect happened likely because you’re looking at over 100 comments per hour for 7 hours. This would normally be considered “gaming” the search engines if it happened in any other location than the comments section.
• We sure didn’t expect that many comments to occur in that 7 hour timespan!
• The effect, though humorous, is likely quite temporary. This is because ProBlogger isn’t about SEO, it’s about blogging professionally. There are millions of other places on the web that are either solely or at least majorly devoted entirely to SEO, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Darren’s post falls off the front page within a few days, if not sooner.
• “Google bombing” is much different, involving links and negative phrases to “target” a web site’s rank in Google for that specific term - and Google’s got an algo in place for stopping it. For more information, check out Matt Cutts’ explanation.

The purpose of this post is to help illustrate the truth that Google IS updating on a consistent, frequent basis (ie. 24/7). It’ll be quite interesting to watch that search query for the next few days to see how the post slinks back down in the SERPs.

Popularity: 60% [?]

This is simply amazing… Darren Rowse is celebrating his ProBlogger Birthday Bash in a huge way, by giving away prizes worth over $54,000!

Darren has hired Anubis Marketing to manage the giveaway celebration, so I’m here to tell you with insider information that there are some prizes here you are NOT going to want to miss out on! We’ve got everything from CD’s and books to pure cash to super hi-def computer monitors to full on web site designs and theme songs for video bloggers!

Some of the “contest” will require readers to simply post a comment in a certain post, and yet others will require blog owners to actually write a post on their sites and tell us about it in the comments. All winners are chosen at random, but you can’t win if you don’t play! So you need to get over to ProBlogger and subscribe to the RSS feed immediately so you can be on top of all the news and happenings. It’s not a condition of entry, but since everything will be going off at random times, it’ll help you stay “in the know”!

Popularity: 44% [?]