The Wall Street Journal is covering John Scott's V7ndotcom contest today on the front page of the Marketplace section. You can also see a link to the story on their technology page (but a membership is required to read). There's a screen capture here (via Colleen at V7N forums).

Luckily, I bought a copy down at the local newsstand to excerpt:

In Contest, Players Vie to Position a Site Atop a Google Search
by Lee Gomes

Remember how your parents used to tell you that when you encounter people you don't like, you should just ignore them? This story will help to show you why that's true.

John Scott is a member of the occassionally shadowy fraternity of "search engine optimizers." or SEOs. These folks are paid to boost a site's ranking in search engines like Google, a maneuver that is likely to pull in more visitors and thus, in many cases, more business. Depending on whom you talk to, SEOs are either the Saint Bernards of the Web, helping to rescue lost sites, or glorified spammers...

...Visit any web site where SEOs gather to discuss their trade, and you'll find arguments about the contest. One of the points of disagreement is what, if anything, the event actually proves. Mr. Scott says it exposes holes in the way search engines rank pages; others say the techniques being used in the contest have long been known to - and discounted by - Google and the other big engines...

...Jim Westergren, a 24-year-old SEO in Sweden, has been the leader for amny of the past few days. In an interview, he explained some of his tactics - or as many as he was willing to share - for getting links...

...Mr. Westergren says that he uses as his base of operations an older Web page he controls, because they are given more weight by Google than newer pages. He has swapped links with other SEOs he's friendly with, and he has paid hundreds of dollars for links from some pages that are highly ranked by Google...

.. Like the Internet, the contest is international. There is, for instance, the "Taggle Team," a loosely affiliated network of 20 mostly anonymous French SEOs, some of whom display black hats atop their Web pages...

...Google's Mr. Cutts said in an interview on an SEO Webcast that he is keeping an eye on the contest. Mr. Scott said the contest is already the biggest in SEO history. His antagonists said they are sorry they ever got involved. And Mr. Westergren? He said, "If you link to me in your article, that would be very nice."

Lots of very interesting stuff, and a shockingly accurate article on the industry, IMO. Despite a few flawed sentences and turns of logic, I think that Mr. Gomes did a remarkable job getting inside the industry and understanding the contest quite well.

They're discussing the publicity over at V7N and Matt Cutts is on it, too.