Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ

Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ
Final status as of 7 July 2004
Position: 6  -  Pagerank: 6

Updated October 18, 2004

What is the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ?

The Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ is a list of frequently asked questions about the phrase "nigritude ultramarine", a nonsense phrase coined as part of the DarkBlue SEO Challenge. It's also an attempt to answer questions about the contest itself and lessons learned about search engine optimization from my participation in the contest. The SEO Challenge contestant banner graphic is displayed as evidence of this page's participation in the event. If you have a question, serious or not, use the email link at the bottom of the page to ask and I will attempt to provide an answer.

Who maintains the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ? And why?

The FAQ is maintained by me, R. Steven Rainwater, also the maintainer of the Usenet Robot Competition FAQ. Why did I create this FAQ? After reading about the SEO Challenge on Slashdot, I looked at many of the sites entering the challenge and discovered that few were actually informative, useful sites. Most were simply the exposed tip of giant, parasitic link farms with little or no explanation as to what was going on. I believe the web is first and foremost a place for peer-to-peer, helpful information exchange between users. The FAQ is one of the oldest and most useful examples of this idea. So, I decided it would be amusingly ironic if an actual informational site beat out pages built by SEO "experts" who use link farms, keyword spamming, and who know what else to artificially inflate their page ranks.

Dark Blue posted an interview with me about this FAQ and the contest.

Why did so many websites start talking about nigritude ultramarine?

Two organizations, Dark Blue and Search Guild, sponsored a competition related to web site search optimization. The contest had two goals. The first was to place a website in the number one position on Google for the phrase "nigritude ultramarine". The winner was the site in the number one position one 9am GMT 7 June - this winner was known as the "Player". The second goal was to have the number one spot on Google for the same search phrase one month later at 9am GMT 7 July - this winner was known as the "Stayer".

Why was the phrase "Nigritude Ultramarine" chosen?

The phrase was selected because it produced no results when entered into the Google search engine. A simple phrase of two keywords was desired for the challenge and a phrase with no existing search results provided a level playing field for all participants. Using a phrase with no previous search results also prevents the contest from interfering normal Google operations. Also, the words in the search phrase have meanings similar to those of the company name Dark Blue, one of the contest sponsors. Dark -> Nigritude, Blue -> Ultramarine, get it? If not, keep reading for a more detailed explanation.

What does the phrase "Nigritude Ultramarine" mean?

Despite sounding like a vaguely racial insult concerning a naval officer, the phrase is meaningless. The individual words, however are real.

So, what do the words mean?

nigritude is defined by Dictionary.com as follows:

\Nig"ri*tude\, n. [L. nigritudo, fr. niger black.] Blackness; the state of being black.

ultramarine is defined by Dictionary.com as follows:

\ul-tra-ma-rine\, [From Medieval Latin ultrmarnus, from beyond the sea : Latin ultr, ultra- + Latin marnus, of the sea (from mare, sea. See mori- in Indo-European Roots).]

• n
  1. 1. A blue pigment made from powdered lapis lazuli.
     2. A similar pigment made synthetically by heating clay, sodium carbonate, and sulfur together.
  2. A vivid or strong blue to purplish blue.
• adj.
  1. Of the color ultramarine.
  2. Of or from a place beyond the sea.

For a detailed history of the blue pigment known as ultramarine, there's a very informative Wikipedia article on the subject.

Had anyone ever actually used the word nigritude before this contest?

Kenneth Hughes, an African American artist and poet, used the word in a poem that goes by the name, NIGRITUDE.

Who won the July 7th "Stayer's prize"?

The winner of the final segment of the nigritude ultramarine contest, which ended on July 7th, was Anil Dash's site. Anil's site is a blog and appears to have won with the help of old fasioned blog-based Google bombing, showing that despite Google's efforts at protecting against Google bombing bloggers, the bloggers still have a significant amount of power to manipulate search engine results. Also, as in the Player's prize on June 7th, both the first and second place winners had ODP links to their sites. The number two site had almost nothing else going for it, but it did have not one but two ODP links. (only one of the two ODP links remains as of July 7th)

Overall, the July 7th results show improvement over the June 7th results in that many more of the winning sites include real content of one form or another. This is probably an indication that it takes a while for the Google algorithm work. It takes one month for a new page to be assigned a pagerank trust metric and a further month to begin adjusting the positioning algorithm based on the trust metrics. Three or four months would probably be needed to achieve optimum results.

In addition to the Stayer's prize. Dark Blue awarded several runner-up prizes including:

• Best Blog: theanomaly
• Best Definition: powerofeyes
• Judge's Choice: srainwater
• Honorable mention for consistency: philipp
• Honorable mention for not-giving-up: T2DMan
• Honorable mention for "product range: smugmug

Nigritude Ultramarine stats as they existed on July 7

Who won the June 7th "Player's prize"?

The winner of the first segment of the nigritude ultramarine contest, which ended on June 7th, was merkey's site. The winning site was a message forum populated with 2,770 pages of cross-linked, keyword packed posts, some directly related to the context and many unrelated posts from the previously existing forum. The site also had 2,870 inbound contextual links from other sites on June 7th. Finally, the winning site was one of only three that managed to get an ODP link despite ODP's official policy of neutrality (the number one and two winners used sites that were already listed in ODP). ODP links arguably carry somewhat higher than average weight with Google and this could easily have been what pushed up the top two sites. An internal discussion at ODP concerning these nigritude ultramarine sites determined that there was no foul play. The two winners were using sites already listed for legitimate reasons having nothing to do with the contest. The other listed site wasn't displaying the required banner and so wasn't an actual contestant site. The name was simply being used as the name for a KDE desktop theme, perhaps indicating that the nigritude ultramarine meme has spread beyond the contest.

The top 10 results were dominated by contentless sites using primarily "nigritude ultramarine" contextual links (Google Bombing) to inflate their rankings. Below is a summary of the top 10 on June 7th. "Non-contestants" are sites which were not displaying the required contestant name banner graphic and so not eligible to win. "Backlinks" are links to the site recognized as such when doing a Google "link:" search on the site. "All links" are the links found doing a Google "@:" search on the site. Pagerank is rounded to the nearest integer number. "Pages" refers to the total number of pages Google indexes for the given site. "Techniques" is just my guess at what the contestant was trying to do.

Nigritude Ultramarine stats as they existed on June 7

Compare the top 10 to the following few sites which had real content related to the nigritude ultramarine contest but were not using black/grey hat techniques to boost their rankings. These are sites which I imagine someone searching on test phrase might really want to find.

Note: Ross Hunter emailed to point out, in Google's defense, that the Dark Blue SEO Challenge page has noindex and nofollow meta tags to intentionally prevent it from being indexed. By the way, Ross has written an interesting article about the contest.

Did anyone think of an eBay tie-in?

Yes, eBay seller samfad from the United Kingdom auctioned his search engine optimization services and links from his websites. He further promised that "the winner of this auction will have my SEO sword at their side. I shall fight for your honor!". The final price for his auction was $8.00. Another eBay seller offered nigritude ultramarine itself, though for "confidential reasons" the auction showed a photo of a cute Hooter's girl rather than nigritude ultramarine. The Hooter's girl auction closed at a whopping $0.01. The last eBay event was an auction for a pair of Nike Aqua Sunray Sandals that included a link to a contestant's site (this is likely in violation of eBay's no-links policy). The auction was timed to end on June 8th, one day after the first phase of the nigritude ultramarine contest.

Did this FAQ win the competition?

No, but it won the "Judge's Choice" award; a sort of runner-up or honorable mention award. At the end of the contest this page was in position 6 of the Google search results (out of 500,000+ pages). The highest position achieved during the course of the contest was position 5. By refraing from the use of black hat SEO techniques, this page served as sort of a control in the contest, allowing everyone to find out how well a content-based page could do against determined search engine optimization techniques.

Were some of the contestants penalized by Google during the contest?

I believe so but it's difficult to say for certain without inside knowledge of the Google algorithms. During most of the May, the FAQ was in the top 10. However, on May 21, Google stopped updating the cached copy of this page in Google's database. This condition lasted through June 8th. Google's robot, GoogleBot, continued to hit the page daily through June 2nd but did not update the Google database. For a period of time After June 2nd, there were no further visits from Googlebot at all. During the period from May 21 until June 8th, the site sank in the results from position 8 to position 44.

On June 8th, one day after the first phase of the contest ended, Google updated their database using the last GoogleBot visit data from June 2nd. But there were still no new visits from Googlebot. The update contributed to a sudden jump back up to position 10. Finally, on June 12th, GoogleBot finally hit the site again. Our penalty status seemed to have ended but after that time Googlebot visited every five days rather than every day as during the first weeks of the competition. This may be normal; perhaps based on Google's estimate of the rate of change on this particular page.

Quite a few other nigritude ultramarine sites appeared to have been penalized by Google during the contest. Some, no doubt, for legitimate reasons. But at least three of the few sites with real content which were not using black hat SEO techniques (this one, the Slashdot story, and a blog about the contest) appear to have been penalized for unknown reasons at approximately the same time.

No one has offered a convincing explanation for why these sites might have been penalized by Google but there are lots of theories. I briefly included a links page which linked to other Nigritudes Ultramarine sites and several knowledgeable folks I've talked to suggested that linking to a penalized site, penalizes your site. If true, this could lead to chain reactions. (e.g. someone I link to violates the rules and becomes penalized, because I linked to the site, my site is penalized. Because the Slashdot story linked to my site, which is now penalized, the Slashdot story becomes penalized.) This theory does explain some things about what happened but seems more unlikely the more I think about it. If true, what would prevent a catastrophic, dominoe effect of penalized sites? Other top 10 nigritude ultramarine sites continued to link to the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ without being penalized, so I'm not convinced this theory holds up.

I checked the Google webmaster guidelines but found nothing helpful. They suggest an email to help@google.com for problems not addressed by the guidelines. In true corporate tech support style, the response to my email said they couldn't help me through email and that I should consult the guidelines page. :-)

Other theories about why Google penalized these sites:

• A Black Hat SEO filed a Google spam report against us. Actual two such reports were filed during the contest but similar reports are said to have been filed against almost all Nigritude Ultramarine sites. This is a standard Black Hat technique to lower a competitor's rank.
• An unknown Black Hat SEO attack singled out specific sites like this one and Slashdot that were doing too well against the Black Hats. Sounds good - but what did they do and how does one defend against it?
• Google chose to penalize some sites in order to manipulate the contest results. This one seems highly unlikely to me, since several of the penalized sites were the ones with real content and penalizing them allowed Black Hat sites to get ahead, making Google's ranking algorithms look bad. If Google were going to manipulate the contest, why not do it in their favor and make the results show the non-Black Hat sites with the most relevant content?
• There was some problem with the pages themselves which brought on the penalty. This seems most likely to me but, if true, means there was something wrong with this page and others with real content, like the Slashdot story, that is not described on the Google Webmaster Guidelines page.
• There actually was no penalty. This is a possibility too. There's no question that it takes several months for a site's Google pagerank and result position to "stabalize", so perhaps what seemed to be a penalty was simply an extreme result of Google's ranking process brought on by the unusual conditions of the contest.

Regardless of our position at any point during the contest, was a very worthwhile exercise from which we learned a lot about Google and search engine optimization. We also received a lot of supportive email for making the attempt to put a page with real content up against hundreds of Black Hat SEOs.

How did search engine robots find Nigritude Ultramarine sites?

Search engine robots follow links from sites they have already indexed and some search engines, such as Google, allow users to submit new URLs directly. (By the way, if you're looking for that other kind of robots try robots.net) I submitted the URL of the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ to Google and it was indexed within 24 hours. But many other search engines have found the site, even though I did not (and in some cases could not) submit it to them. Here are the robots that have indexed this site within the last 24 hours:

220.181.61.208 - - [10/May/2009:01:01:49 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "-"
65.55.217.43 - - [10/May/2009:01:57:44 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "msnbot-media/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
67.195.37.155 - - [10/May/2009:02:05:54 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
66.249.71.228 - - [10/May/2009:03:54:25 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "Googlebot-Image/1.0"
65.55.106.173 - - [10/May/2009:06:33:09 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
208.103.243.35 - - [10/May/2009:07:05:22 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "Java/1.6.0_13"
64.150.182.45 - - [10/May/2009:09:25:46 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "NutchCVS/Nutch-1.0 (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/bot.html; nutch-agent@lucene.apache.org)"
65.55.104.161 - - [10/May/2009:10:14:01 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
202.160.188.219 - - [10/May/2009:15:07:00 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp China; http://misc.yahoo.com.cn/help.html)"
67.195.112.167 - - [10/May/2009:15:14:32 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
220.181.61.208 - - [10/May/2009:15:41:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "-"
67.16.94.2 - - [10/May/2009:16:45:08 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "Gigabot/3.0 (http://www.gigablast.com/spider.html)"
93.158.148.30 - - [10/May/2009:17:00:10 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I)"
85.17.167.198 - - [10/May/2009:18:29:48 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "Java/1.6.0_12"
93.158.148.30 - - [10/May/2009:18:49:17 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "Yandex/1.01.001 (compatible; Win16; I)"
81.19.79.209 - - [10/May/2009:18:50:55 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "StackRambler/2.0 (MSIE incompatible)"
65.55.209.175 - - [10/May/2009:18:53:27 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"
220.181.61.223 - - [10/May/2009:19:00:54 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "-"
67.195.37.124 - - [10/May/2009:23:38:56 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 55 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)"
65.55.209.178 - - [10/May/2009:23:45:34 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55 "-" "msnbot/1.1 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)"

What other robots discovered the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ?

151.200.112.197 - - [21/May/2004:00:01:11 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 55
151.200.112.197 - - [21/May/2004:00:01:12 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 12878

24 hours later I received the first spam to the info@nigritudeultramarines.com email address. Most likely the unidentified robot was collecting email addresses for spammers. Other non-search engine robots are operated by individuals or universities for research purposes. Some robots search websites for "intellectual property" violations. Others may come from search engines but are looking for content other than webpages.

Did anyone besides search engine robots look at these sites?

I can't speak for the other contest sites but the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ received a small but steady stream of hits during the contest; about 100 page views per day. There was a spike in activity on July 7th and July 8th, probably from the large number of people looking at the top 10 sites as the contest ended. I've received a number of emails on this topic, so I've decided to make the website statistics for the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ publicly available. Stats after the end of the contest are not available publicly. The volume of referer spam simply made it impractical to allow public access. I can make the complete Apache logs available to interested parties for research purposes. My stats were generated from the Apache logs with the Webalizer, an Open Source, Free Software package licensed under the GNU GPL. I highly recommend this package to anyone who needs to generate detailed website statistics.

Did any directory sites participate in the contest?

Yes, GoGuides and WoWDirectory, two small, proprietary directory sites, actively promoted one of the contestants by adding a link to his site on every page of their directories. None of the major Internet directory sites such as ODP or Yahoo! officially participated or sponsoring participants.

Unofficially, three ODP editors participated in the contest: srainwater (this site), bobrat, and totalxsive. But ODP never linked to these three sites and officially remained neutral, not accepting contest-related submissions during the contest period. (with one inadvertant exception from a non-contestant - see below)

The first and second place winners of both the June 7th and July 7th phases of the contest managed to take advantage of an ODP link during the contest in spite of ODP's neutrality. Merkey's site, the winner in the June 7th phase of the contest was already listed in ODP's web message board category. Philip's site, which came in second, had an existing listing in ODP's personal weblogs category. Finally, proving that an ODP link doesn't guarantee high Google placement, The Nigritude Ultramarine KDE desktop theme website was listed in ODP's KDE theme category after the contest started by an editor that wasn't aware of the contest. But the ODP listing had little effect on this sites ranking in the Google results.

Did Google participate in the Nigritude Ultramarine contest?

Not as far as anyone can tell. They did not officially even acknowledge the existence of the contest, though the contest organizers reported several hits on their website originated from users within Google's IP range. There can be no doubt Google was aware of it. Hopefully, they will study the techniques used by the participants and use the information to improve Google's resistence to SEO attacks.

Several sources (including this FAQ) incorrectly reported that Wesley Chan, a Google product manager and staff photographer, entered a nigritude ultramarine page in the contest. However, Wesley tells me that, "Apparently, the hosting company (SmugMug) for my photography site added a link to every page and customer webpage in an attempt to raise their site in the google search rankings as part of their contest entry. This link was added to my photography hosting page without my knowledge and permission. Again, I in no way entered this contest or willingly helped any party enter or participate in this contest."

Is it possible to track the progress of contestants over time?

Yes, a searchguild user, digitalpoint, maintained a graph that shows the progress of the top nigritude ultramarine contenders over time. The graph was updated daily at 12:15 PST and plots time vs some unspecified numerical value between 1 and 50 that appears to be inversely proportional to a page's position in the search results (if someone has a better theory about what is being graphed, let me know!)

digitalpoint's chart

What music should I listen to while browsing Nigritude Ultramarine sites?

I recommend the Vivid Ultramarine CD, Ford Cortina, released by Petal Records in November 2002. For a sample, try the MP3 of VUGroove. Vivid Ultramarine describes itself as "A colour with an aquatic edge". The Melbourne, Australia band is "self-recording, self-producing, and self-promoting". Check 'em out.

Google listed over 500,000 nigritude ultramarine pages. Were there that many?

Yes and no. There were only a couple of hundred contestants. The rest of those pages contained links to the contest pages. The reason there were so many was 1) Many observers participated indirectly by linking to their favorite Nigritude Ultramarine site and 2) black hat SEOs were attempting to attack Google's ranking system by flooding it with links to their page from parasitic links farms containing thousands of pages. See below for more information Google Bombing and black hat SEOs in general.

What's all this black hat and white hat SEO stuff I keep reading about?

Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) fall into roughly two categories. (as you're probably aware, all humans can be divided into two categories, those who divide things into two categories and those who do not). Anyway, to understand this, you have to first understand what a search engine is and what its purpose is. Google, or any other search engine, exists to assist you, the user, in finding web pages. Generally, when you are doing a search, you are trying to find the site on the web that is most relevant to whatever you're searching for; the "best site". Google tries to find ways to algorithmically determine which sites best match the keywords you search for and lists the results in the order most likely to help you, the user (i.e., Google is trying to list sites in order of which site is "best").

Now try looking at it from the perspective of a website designer. You've just created a new web page and you want to make sure it gets listed in Google and other search engines. A search engine optimization expert can assist you with this by making sure you have well-written copy and correctly formed HTML. They can advise you on other ways of improving your site's content and links. This type of SEO is called a White Hat SEO - basically they try to help you make your web page better because they know Google is trying to list the best pages first.

But there's another type of person out there. These are the same sort of people who send the spam that clogs your mailbox. They create websites that want to sell you something. These are typically ugly, badly designed websites with no useful information - just a sales pitch. They know that to get lots of sales, they need to be listed at the top of the Google results. They also know that no one wants to look at their websites and that Google won't value them highly because they contain no useful information. So they turn to a special kind of search engine optimizer, a Black Hat SEO, who is willing to cheat and break rules. They find ways to attack Google's ranking system in such a way that they can manipulate the results. They want you to see their site first instead of the site you're trying to find.

Because the majority of contestants in the nigritude ultramarine contest are SEOs, most of them are aware of black hat SEO techniques. So, even among those SEOs who don't use black hat techniques normally, there is a strong temptation to use them to help their nigritude ultramarine sites win the contest.

What did Black Hat SEOs do to win the Nigritude Ultramarine contest?

The Black Hats used a number of tricks to try to cheat their way to the top in Nigritude Ultramarine contest (perhaps we should be calling them Nigritude Hats in this context?). Some of these methods include:

• False spam reports - A common black hat SEO trick to push their site ahead of a competitor's site is to try to get Google to penalize their competitor's listing by filing a fraudulent spam complaint against it through Google's feedback system. Within 2 hours of going online a spam complaint had been filed against this site, for example. Several more have been filed since.

• Cloaking - Another Black Hat trick being used, called "cloaking", is where a different website is presented to normal users than to the Google spider. There can be a couple of reasons for cloaking a site.

  The first is to attack Google's search algorithm by presenting a webpage stuffed with keywords and content targeted at a search phrase unrelated to the real content of the page. When you look the page, you might see a page selling Viagra (or Nigritude Ultramarine) but when GoogleBot looks at it, it sees a page about stamp collecting and indexes it with stamp collecting sites.

  A more recent and sinister use of cloaking allows a Black Hat SEO to directly attack a competitor's website, suppressing its placement in the Google results. Google has a penalty in their algorithm for sites that contain "duplicate content" - that is, sites that have stolen the content from another site. It determines which site is the duplicate by which has the higher page rank. The lower ranked site which is usually the thief, is dropped from the search results. Since Black Hat SEO's often maintain highly ranked parasitic link farms (see below), they can steal your site's content, put it on their link farm and, very likely, your site will vanish from the Google results because of a slightly lower page rank. This technique has being used successfully in the Nigritude Ultramarine contest against several sites (and was attempted but failed against this site). You can read more about the use of cloaking in the nigritude ultramarine contest in a recent WebProNews.com article by Garrett French.

• Referer spamming - Many websites make their monthly statistics available to the public. Many of these stats pages list the referrers, that is, they list the websites that referred people to them (due to a spelling error in the HTTP protocol standard, the referrer is commonly known as referer in web circles). Often the referers listed on a stats page are active links. In cases like this Google may index the stats page just like any other web page and count the referer links in the stats the same as any other links, slightly boosting the rank of the site they link to. Black Hat SEOs realized this and began writing special web spiders and robots that repeatedly visited sites with publicly available stats, leaving as the referer, their client's website. This would create many new links to their client's site, boosting them to the top of the Google results. It also caused major headaches for the victim's site, make their statistics unusable, and inflating the load on the server. These days most people have to password protect their stats to prevent Black Hat SEO attacks. If your web statistics showed lots of referrals from sites with nigritude ultramarine in the name during the contest period, this could have been the cause. (it's also possible there really was a link to your site, though. Always do some research before jumping to conclusions on possible referer spams!)

  Over 20% of all traffic hitting this site in June was from one particular referer spammer. See the June stats page to view the total referer spam counts for the month (I've hidden and grouped the spammers' links to they don't get any benefit from them but we still get to have fun observing their antics). The spammer was trying to get links to a collection of pornography sites. The referer spams came from an automated program that disguised itself using random agent strings. The hits originated from 66.55.135.113 and 66.55.135.148, IP addresses belonging to an ISP in Hazlet, New Jersey called Choopa.com. The porno sites themselves were hosted by Blue Gravity Communications, Inc in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Documentation of the referer spamming was emailed to both ISPs.

  Choopa.com replied promptly indicating that the suspect IPs were used by one of their clients, another hosting company called HQ Host, based in Sarasota Florida. Ironically, HQ Host, the source of referrer spams for a pornography site, has an AUP that specifically prohibits pornography related sites. Choopa.com CC'd me on email sent to HQ Host requesting they investigate the source of the spamming. I received no reply from HQ Host but shortly after the Choopa email to HQ Host, I began receive a wave of referrer spamming advertising the HQ Host website. This spamming originated from an IP address in Kiev, Ukraine (probably script kiddies on a compromised machine).

  Blue Gravity Communications was very evasive. They would not even confirm whether or not they host any of the pornography sites being promoted by the spamming, despite Whois and traceroute data pointing to them. Their tech support emails initially claimed they didn't know what referrer spamming was. After several emails, they simply stopped responding altogether. My impression is that Blue Gravity is probably a haven for porno sites and tech support has instructions to give the run-around to anyone who complains about the side effects. (someone else at my office suggested that if they're in New Jersey and involved in pornography, they're probably hooked up with the Mafia. Great. Who'd have thought a phrase like nigritude ultramarine would lead to organized crime? Let's hope I haven't annoyed them enough to warrant a hit man)

• Google Bombing - This was originally a harmless activity done for fun by bloggers. Thousands of people would agree on text for a contextual link and place it in their weblog. The cumulative links would distort the Google results for the target keywords, forcing a particular page to the top of the search results. For example, a favorite was to link to the Microsoft website using the text "go to hell". When you searched on the phrase "go to hell" in Google, the Microsoft site would be the first result. Black hat SEOs adopted this technique to force their client's websites to the top of search results for keywords where they don't belong. It's widely believed that Google's algorithm now tries to filter out Google Bombs by looking for sudden increases in contextual links for specific sites and temporarily pulling them from the search results. There are several variations on Google Bombing including Humor bombs (bombing done as a joke) and Ego Bombs (bombing done to boost a personal page).
• Parasitic link farms - Link farms are an old method of attacking the Google page rank that is still being used by black hats. A link farm is a huge website filled with thousands of inter-linked pages. These farms are then used to inflate the rank of a target page by adding links to it from each page in the link farm. Sometimes link farms are disguised as "web directories" and may use the freely available data from the Open Directory Project as seed content. Typically a link farm will also attempt to obtain hi-jacked domain names that are already listed in search engines and directories. The use of hi-jacked domains boosts the page rank of the link farm (and indirectly the result of the target page(s) the link farm is supporting). This is a variant of Google Bombing. It still works to some extent but is no longer as effective at distorting the search results as it used to be due to improvements in Google's algorithms. Several contestants in the nigritude ultramarine contest (including several in the top 10) have boasted of having in excess of 100,000 links from link farms to boost their entries ranking. Time will tell how well Google resists this magnitude of link farm attack. One very positive result that may come from the nigritude ultramarine contest is that Google may be able to identify some of the major link farms and prevent them from distorting search results in the future.
• Page count inflation - Google's algorithm seems to favor pages which reside on sites with many other interlinked pages. Because of this bias toward large sites, some black hats try to boost a page's rank by adding hundreds or even thousands of other pages to the same domain. These page are then interlinked in much the same way a traditional link farm would be.
• Keyword spamming - This is one of the oldest and probably least effective methods of trying to attack a search engine's ranking algorithm. It consists of simple stuffing the copy on a webpage with the exact text of the target keywords in as many places as possible. The HTML meta tags are usually stuffed with duplicate keywords as well. This technique is usually used in combination with more sophisticated attacks but can be seen in several of the top ten nigritude ultramarine results.
• Guestbook spamming - Another very old technique. Long, long ago, people thought that having a thing called a "guestbook" on their website was a cool idea (these are usually the same people who think animated GIFs of hopping bunnies and flaming torches are a cool design idea). A guestbook allows anyone who visits the site to post a short message that can include a link to their site. A guestbook spammer is someone who goes to many guestbooks solely for the purpose of creating many links back to their site to boost its position in the Google results. Often an automated program is given a list of guestbooks and does the spamming automatically.
• Blog spamming - Like guestbook spamming but an SEO (or an SEO controlled robot) spams the comment area of weblogs.
• Forum spamming - Like guestbook spamming but an SEO (or an SEO controlled robot) spams the web discussion forums.

What "Grey" SEO techniques has the contest brought to light?

The strangest controversy so far over a questionable SEO strategy used in the Nigritude Ultramarine contest has been the spamming of Wiki sandboxes. The technique was first suggested by Philipp Lenssen in his blog (which is a contest site). Essentially, it's a new twist on guestbook spamming. His page shot to the top of the Google results in a matter of days using this technique. As other contestants began following his lead, Wiki maintainers complained about abuse of their sites. The grey area is that Wiki sandboxes are intended to be used by anyone for any sort of content they want for the purpose of learning how the Wiki site works. So the actual placing of a particular link in a sandbox doesn't violate the rules. As the Wiki maintainers point out however, the intent of the spammer is not learning about Wikis but use of Wiki resources to boost their Google result ranking. The end result is that Wiki sites have to put up with an increased traffic load, unrelated to their site's content as endless streams of users edit and re-edit the sandbox to point to their site.

A negative article about Wiki sandbox spamming appeared in Webpronews (surprisingly, by someone who didn't know what a Wiki was prior to the controversy!). Then an angry Wiki maintainer tracked the source of the problem to Philipp, prompting him to recant. A visit to any Wiki sandbox reveals that the Genie is out of the bottle and spamming from SEOs for all sorts of websites is now occurring, despite pleas from many Wiki maintainers. As of this writing Philipp's site still holds a top position, likely due to his high page rank plus the large number of inbound links his site gained while in the news. The Wiki links probably contributed to the initial rise in the results are unlikely to still be factor since most of the sandbox spams have been cleaned up or overwritten by other SEOs at this point.

Will you link to my l33t Nigritude Ultramarine site?

No. I tried this briefly but some of those I exchanged links with were using black hat techniques and were in what Googles refers to as "bad neighborhoods". This was having a bad effect on the ranking of this site, so I've discontinued the links page. Sorry folks!

Is there a Free Software project named Nigritude Ultramarine?

Yes, deekayen has announced such a project, however it has not yet produced any source code. The project's goal is to provide a convenient Open Source PHP/MySQL package with the functionality original designed for the Advanced Automation website.

What about a Nigritude Ultramarine desktop theme?

Yep, we've got you covered there too. Try the Nigritude Ultramarine Theme for the KDE desktop (sorry, no GNOME/GTK+ version!). Strangely this Sourceforge site doesn't appear to be taking part in the SEO contest and doesn't reference it at all. It provides an alternate (and questionable, since we know the site wasn't there prior to the contest) explanation of the name. Nigritude is said to represent the "dark art of desktop usability" and ultramarine represents the "blue screen of death" so familiar to Microsoft Windows users. An interesting side note is that this site somehow managed to slip under the radar and get itself listed on ODP.

Isn't the Ultramarine some sort of bird?

You're thinking of the Ultramarine Flycatcher (Ficedula superciliaris superciliaris), an old-world, arboreal insectivore which takes its prey in flight.

Wasn't there a Tom Swift book about a vehicle called the Ultramarine?

No. You're probably thinking of Tom Swift and his Jet-Marine (1954), one of the Tom Swift, Jr. series of books. However, Jim Lawrence, who wrote several books in the Tom Swift Jr. series also worked on an Infocom game in the early 1980s called Seastalker which included references to a fictional Ultramarine biocepter. I'm told there is also an obscure book by Malcolm Lowry, called Ultramarine and published in 1933, about a young man's experiences as a deckhand on a ship.

What About other SEO Contests? (added Jan 2006)

New SEO contests keep popping up and I'm just too busy to participate directly. A friend of mine has entered a couple of these contests and is donating any prize money to the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Disease Research. This seems like a good cause, so I'll throw some links his way from this FAQ. If you'd like to help out his site (and the research charity), add a link to his contest page on your website too!

Here's his entry in the V7ndotcom Elursrebmem contest

And here's his website for the carcasherdotcom seocontest.

Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ
Updated 15 Feb 2005
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