Imagine that you are afflicted with a disease that prevents you from consuming foods you love: Pizza, pasta, bread.
Beer.
It’s called Celiac disease and it affects up to 3 million Americans and Europeans. It is an intolerance of a protein in gluten, found in barley, wheat and rye. Many celiacs also have an adverse reaction to oats. Barley, as you know, is what beer is made out of.
Switch focus to Colorado, where a Dad who goes by the nom de guerre “Hulkster” has a couple of young boys both afflicted with this genetic disorder. He’s a good Dad, making sure the kids get a non-gluten diet, actually reading the ingredients list on packaged foods and otherwise watching what they eat. In addition, he spends a good amount of time raising awareness of Celiac and raising money for research, and doing so in some unusual ways. His Holiday light display a couple of years ago earned money for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research.
Another way he has raised money, and continues to raise money, is by donating the proceeds of SEO contests. He never sees any of this money; it is sent directly to the research center.
What’s an SEO contest? What’s SEO?
SEO is the abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization”. The topic is much too broad to go into here (try Wikipedia’s article on Search Engine Optimization for more information), but suffice it to say that site owners–or the people they hire–spend a lot of time working and re-working their sites and inbound links in order to “rank” highly for particular search terms. The Web is so vast and there are so many potential hits for nearly every term that users seldom look beyond the first page of results. Getting at or near the top for their preferred keywords becomes an obsession. You’ve certainly seen the seedier side of Search Engine Optimization. Ever search for an innocuous term and end frustrated by all of the porn, real estate, and hotel reservation junk links that come up?
An entire industry has built up around the idea and, of course, when a group of people have a specialty, it is inevitable that several of them want to prove how skilled they are.
The basic SEO contest is simple: Start with a phrase, perhaps pure nonsense, that does not appear in any search engine. Then, whoever can get their site to be number one in a search engine (usually Google, but the idea pre-dates that juggernaut) after a set time, say, six months, is declared the winner. The sponsor of the contest is usually trying to increase the exposure of their own site in doing so, so there are often cash prizes involved.
And that brings us back to Hulkster. He is simply a hobbyist, not a professional Search Engine Optimizer, and, as I’ve mentioned, donates all the proceeds, should he win, to research. A recent contest, called V7ndotcom elursrebmem, didn’t see him in first place, but close enough to the top that over $5000 was raised for the Center for Celiac Research. He’s in a new contest now, carcasherdotcom seocontest, that ends in December of this year and, unusually, is using all three of the largest search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search) to determine the winners.
That’s why we have added a link to Hulkster’s site in our sidebar and we encourage any other site-owners or bloggers reading this to do the same. It’s for a good cause, every inbound link helps, and, honestly, it can’t get any easier. If you want to help, please read about it in Hulkster’s own words.
Postscript
Celiac is common enough that it is possible to find restaurants that are gluten-free, such as Deby’s Gluten Free Bakery. There also a number of brewers who make gluten-free beer, usually out of buckwheat or sorghum.
Update: Hulkster notes that it’s actually Mrs. Hulkster who does more of the work watching the boys’ diet. I didn’t mean to miss giving her her props too. Regardless, it would be nicer for his site to win the contest and the money go to a good cause than lining the pocket of some SEO “pro”.
