Sure you can outrank old high ranking sites with a new site. All you have to do is put more effort or money into promoting than they did. Sometimes working smarter than harder also works.

If Joe has a site ranked #1 for the term “California Race Cars” and he’s been collecting quality links at a rate of 20 a year and has been blogging at a rate of an article a month for the last four years all you have to do is collect 80 high quality links and write 48 blog posts to start ranking close to him on the search engines.

The problem you run into is trying to compete with a site that’s been online for 10 years collecting 1000 quality links a year and blogging 12 articles a month. Without paying someone it’s pretty difficult to come up with 10,000 links and 1440 blog posts overnight.

I’m greatly simplifying things here but this should give you a rough idea of what you are up against.

The chance of creating a new site that ranks #1 for the keyword “porn” is pretty slim, but there are millions of untapped easy to rank keywords still floating around out there.

http://www.ebaspace.com/

I tend to think that the actual winner of this competition would have put more efforts in SEO rather than for his “real job” as a realtor.

Glad you came back and if you’re ever in this wild west:) shoot me a msg and we’ll grab that beer.

k

The piece I wrote in response to your “zero-sum game” comment forced me to think harder about the subject…

I suspect that we actually probably agree about 90% in what we can convey over the Internet, and meeting up for a beer would probably bring that to 95%.

It’s the last 5% that makes life worth living

What the contest HAS proved, though, is the traffic spike that comes from getting involved in interesting conversations, which is win-win…

… if someone comes to my site because they AGREE with me, I might get a sale.

… if someone comes to my site because they DISAGREE with me, and want to tell me so, I might learn something.

I reserve the right, at all times, to admit that I was an idiot in the past and have now learnt something that has made me change my mind

Best wishes from cloudy England,

Mark

But as far as this contest goes (I’m not a realtor and can’t win) it’s not a money term and the only people searching it are those watching, like us. Now if this were targeting “denver real estate” or “UK properties” it would be different and surely pollute the SERPS and serve no one, just egos.

So, let’s agree to agree on that.

I’m one of the people who’s been critical of the competition… despite not being a realtor, let alone an incumbent placeholder on Google for the phrase in question. [1]

If I was a realtor (which I’m not – I’m a UK landlord), then I’d accept it as normal competition for someone else to come along and try to do the same as me – whether that’s by providing better services, or marketing better, or using SEO, or whatever.

The reason I’m against this competition is that people are motivated to play just for the sake of “winning the game”, even though they have nothing to do with the industry. That means that the realtors who ARE trying to use the Internet effectively lose, and so do the Google customers who were trying to find those realtors.

That’s why I’m pro-SEO, but anti SEO-competitions.

[1] Actually, for the phrases I’m most interested in, I hold 8 of the top 10 slots on Google UK, which is the only Google niche I’m after