Under the elaborate title of Wix is the Best, the development platform has set SEOers the challenge of outranking the company for the search term “SEO hero”.

The company has created its very own Wix website for the competition and is offering a $50,000 prize for the site that ranks the highest  on Google by March 16, 2017.

Launched four months ago, there are now a great many sites aimed at beating the company, which states that it created the competition because it has a “reputation problem” in regards to SEO and that “critics think it’s ok to trash our seo” — fair enough.

But is it possible to beat Wix, and is the company playing by its own rules?

Numerous SEOers and agencies have announced their scepticism throughout the competition’s running, including Patrick Stox, who noted right back in the beginning that the concept might be slightly askew:

But that hasn’t stopped him from creating his own site, Be An SEO Hero, or being sceptical about what Wix are doing — by logging suspicious activity and dubious behaviour on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis.

In a recent update on the blog Stox accuses Wix of buying links for their SEO hero websites (of which there are many), despite competition guidelines stating that all websites competing must adhere to Google’s own guidelines:

Last week we saw Wix appear to buy a couple links on different websites that already had Wix advertising on them, except they linked to the SEO Heroes on Wix’s platform in the articles rather than Wix’s contest websites.

I was suspicious at the time but now more of these are showing up, and it does appear Wix is buying links for those in the contest on Wix’s platform. Showing favoritism is about the worst thing the contest host could do.

But Stox, alongside many others, have stated that no one can really win this competition anyway.

Stox continues, saying that:

The ranking websites for “SEO hero” as in past SEO competitions will be spammed to death, including Wix’s entry. They’ll likely disqualify or dispute the final results because of this.

I hope when this happens they’ll at least do the right thing and donate the money to charity, you know something with cute kids or puppies.

In order to give some worth competition however, there are a number of sites donating the prize funds to charity, and Stox will be donating 100 per cent of the money to the Cancer Research Institute in honour of his dad who was lost to cancer in 2015.

How’s it going at the moment?

At the time of writing it looks like seo-hero.tech is in the lead with seo-hero.nija in at number two, with Stox in third.

With less than four days to go it looks like a close finish. At the end of the day this competition will not drag any reputations out of the mud, as it’s hard to get pulled out alive once it’s passed your scalp — it’s not fooling anyone.

But it is a competition let’s just hope it’s judged fairly…