No doubt, you would have heard of the Live8 concert that was recently on or been exposed to the massive global marketing campaign that has gone into promoting the associated websites.

It's a very interesting case study IMO, that if we pulled apart could shed some light on a number of issues for SEO given there are a number of official websites involved, and reveal some interesting tid bits on how each of the search engines rank results today.

There is an enormous amount of traffic to the sites involved and of course links pointed to them in a very short period of time.

So if you are interested, lets nut out what comparisons we want to examine. Here are my suggestions to kick it off:

Search terms:
Live8
One
White Band
Make Poverty History

Search Engines:
Google
Yahoo
MSN

Search Markets:
United States
United Kingdom
Australia
(Italy, France, Russia, and Japan are also involved but for the sake of simplicity I'm suggesting the three English language markets).

Given this is a non-profit cause that doesn't even ask for money, just aims to raise awareness I'm hoping it's ok here to discuss specific urls etc.

If you want a complete list of the websites involved (most countries have their own local site) a list is at: www.whiteband.org/News/actlocally/AllRegions/en

If you have a question about SEO in a competitive market, this case study should reveal the answer as to what works and why.