Geansai Gorm Watch watching Geansai Gorm

Set up by Chris Gallagher, blauwetrui.com is the home of the next contestant.  Working hard they’ve set up a MUZU, Bebo and MySpace space for Geansai Gorm.  He has shown some foresight and set up an up and coming indie rock band, based in Waterford and formed in 2001.  With vision like that he’s gotta be a strong contender.  Chris runs ind.ie (good name) and is using that to boost his rankings: http://www.ind.ie/author/chris-gallagher/.  Domain tools suggests that Chris owns owns about 106 other domains - if they’ve got it right (and it could be another Chris) then he could have a fair bit of firepower for the competition.

I forgot to mention the early starter out of the blocks, Paul Savage (of blackdog.ie), with My blue jumper.com.  Black dog offer more than the usual SEO including "funnel progression".  The competition site got an early boost from backupanytime.ie which seems to be given (see footer of their homepage) the SEO treament, possibly by blackdog.ie. My Blue Jumper was making the early running, but has slipped back now.  I expect it to move towards the top again before the contest is over.

Michele Neylon has booked geansaigorm.info and geansaigorm.mobi - presumably he’s about join in.  Could be unbeatable with those 2 weapons.

The sharks are out.  Someone has registered Geansai_Gorm Dot Biz which clearly is not eligible for the competition itself, but can be used to send traffic that way. They have done a private registration, possibly to hide their identity, but also it may be possible that they believe they will get a higher ranking as Google prefers protected domain names (I’m not sure whether this is the case).  Cleverly they hope to recoup some of their outlay on the domain with some google ads.

mediavirgins.com have pushed a post out there on Geansai Gorm: http://www.mediavirgins.com/2008/10/web/geansai-gorm-seo-as-gaelgie/  . The site is run by the Web 4.0, multiphoned, qiking, twittering, blogging, podcasting non-media virgin, Bernie Goldbach - the man with the sorest thumbs in Ireland.  It doesn’t look like a contestant is going to come out of this site, but if they are going to go for it Bernie might correct the Gaelgie rather than Gaeilge.

SMemon tops the charts with his own blog, which is an ineligible site - but does show that he has some clout to pass to the Geansai Gorm News site.  Gavin Duncan’s site "Person in Ireland" is the leader of the valid sites.  Grey Bandit’s google site "Geansai Gorm Project" is next - although it is likely it will be used to push traffic to the greybandit.com website. www.kae-sometimes-wears-a-blue-jumper.info/ follows, proving conventional wisdom wrong: (1) short snappy domains’ work best and (2) dot info domains don’t do as well.  Early leader my blue jumper.com has dropped way down….but I think he’ll be back.  It’s far too early to derive anything….

Grey Bandit launches the Geansai Gorm project at  http://sites.google.com/site/geansaigormproject/Home.  I wonder it there any danger using Google like that.  If it were me I would be worried that someone would hit the "report abuse" link.  Not that it would bother me that my site was pulled, but rather I’d probably have it linked to a gmail account where I do some pretty legit stuff and I wouldn’t want it tarnished in any way.