SEO Best practice for competitions

[RobertChapman]

I am considering running a competition and wanted to get some feedback on SEO Best Practice.

We will have a  unique competition URL - following the completion of the competition it will be 301'd to home page

Every entrant will be given a unique URL for the competition to share, if someone enters using there URL they get an extra ticket. This means we will create a large number of new unique URL's over a short period of time, the pages however will have the same content. Is this potentially bad for Duplicate content?Any advice? Perhaps a canonical tag on all unique competition entrant URLs?

Any other considerations?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

How about you create dynamic links that are rewritten which redirect to the one main page and just swaps variables.

I.E.

Link shared = site.com/username --> which is actually site.com/user.php?u=username --> sets a cookie with "referral = username" ---> redirect to main "Registration" (or other) page ---> check/read in cookie and apply variables as needed.

That would solve the duplicate content issue while keeping track of referrals.

Cheers,
Oleg

[NakulGoyal]

Robert

I completely understand what you are trying to do. It can and will work. However, I'd suggest you look into your current backlink profile and see if there are diverse kinds of links, natural links. Also, don't overdo any one kind of link building tactic. This is not a 100% Bait and Switch, but, I'll ask you this, if SEO did not exist, would you still do it ? Think of this as a Custom Acquisition and Brand Awareness technique while helping towards SEO.

[Unity]

Agreed, I'd approach this as a custom acquisition and brand awareness project as well. Especially given that the website would have a short life span and SEO is a long term investment.

If this was me I'd optimize the website for the competition name and use social networking to build awareness (ie. facebook, twitter, pinterest etc).