"Nigritude ultramarine" is a term made up by DarkBlue.com (Affiliate Network) and SearchGuild (Webmaster Forums) to test methods and best approaches for search engine optimization (SEO), i.e., the process of modifying a web page's contents and links to ensure a high ranking in a search engine. The specific target of interest is the Google search engine. The phrase was chosen as one for which Google initially produced no results; thus the competition could not adversely affect results for anything real.
Competition
The contest ran from May 7, 2004 to July 7, 2004. Two prizes were awarded for the top position in a Google search: one for the top position on 9am GMT on June 7th 2004 and a second prize awarded at the close of the contest on 9am GMT July 7th 2004.
There were about two hundred competitors, many deploying an astonishing variety of dirty tricks, from Google bombing upwards. The competitive conditions probably encouraged intensive and free use of techniques that would otherwise be used in a more conservative manner, and it is entirely possible that some normally-legitimate SEOs took a dirty approach for the occasion. At least one new SEO dirty trick was first deployed in the competition. Weblogs and wikis were hit by the contest, and needed to be constantly policed to prevent nigritude ultramarine spam from lowering their signal to noise ratio below acceptable limits. Public wiki sandboxes were especially vulnerable.
On July 7, the contest winner was announced as Six Apart Vice President and weblogger Anil Dash. Dash's stated goal in entering the contest was to "prove that real content trumps all the shady optimization tricks that someone can figure out". Instead of resorting to such tactics, he simply wrote a weblog entry and asked his readers to link to it. Another competitor took this idea further, writing the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ, which placed sixth overall, won the "Judge's Choice" award, and remains a valuable source of information about the competition.
Afterlife
Since the end of the formal competition, the evolution of the Google results for "nigritude ultramarine" remains an enlightening area of study. As of September 5, 2004, the top two Google results are the blog entry that won the competition and the Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ.
It is known that Google generally tries to detect and penalise dirty tricks, and "nigritude ultramarine" makes an obvious test case. An important open question remains whether Google has treated "nigritude ultramarine" specially in any way; the notoriously secretive company has refused to comment. It is possible that they have applied special attention to the "nigritude ultramarine" in order to improve the results in this prominent case, but as of September 2004 the Google results do not appear hand-crafted, and several insipid pages have high search results, although lower than they were during the competition. More likely, but also unproven, is that Google has studied the techniques applied to nigritude ultramarine in order to improve their dirty-trick-penalising code.
Comparison of search results for "nigritude ultramarine" during and after the competition is complicated by the change the competition has caused to the meaning of the phrase. Whereas before it was purely a nonsense phrase, which could not possibly be searched for by anyone looking for any real resource, it now refers primarily to the competition itself, and is a natural phrase to search on for information about the competition. (As of September 5 2004, the highest Google result that is an official competition page is SearchGuild's, ranked 18th.) It is also natural for someone to search on it to find out why this nonsense phrase appears in so many web pages. (The Nigritude Ultramarine FAQ, ranked second as of September 5, 2004, is an excellent resource for this.)
Furthermore, the nature of web searching is such that any web-based reporting about the nigritude ultramarine competition, including this encyclopedia article, feeds back and affects the search results in question. (As of January 6 2005 this article at Wikipedia ranked 36th in the Google results for the phrase.) This effect was previously noticed in the reporting of Googlewhacks, and takes a more complex form in this case.
Similar terms in other languages
- in German: Hommingberger Gepardenforelle and Schnitzelmitkartoffelsalat . In English: "Cheetah Trout of Hommingberg". There is not a such trout species; and there is no town or village with the name "Hommingberg".
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