Springleap, a locally based, recently launched site focussed on the design and selling of t-shirts, is running a competition where contestants have been challenged to get themselves to the top of the search engine result pages (SERPs) on a search for “Springleap“.

Not a bad idea from a springleap side of things. I do have an issue though with the “black hat” techniques being used by various participants. And no, not because i think they’re cheating. I think that the prize money has brought out the worst in SEO “trickery”. These guys are just creating more mess, putting up fake blogs that are exactly the types of sites that we all hate. In my opinion spam blogs (splogs) are almost as bad as email spam. So if you hate spam and you’re creating a spam blog, are you not being a little bit of a hypocrite?

I must say that I take a lot of pleasure in flagging springleap splogs as spam.