Is Santa real? That’s the festive dilemma that Sitewire, a Tempe, Arizona based interactive marketing agency intends to help Jay Feitlinger tackle this holiday season. Actually, there’s a search engine hypothesis the agency is testing, while it gently encourages the blogosphere to develop a Santa solution for Feitlinger.

Specifically, the Sitewire folks are testing out a “link baiting” hypothesis to see if their efforts can help that phrase - is Santa real? - (see, there it is again) achieve top 50 status in online search rankings. Sitewire thinks it will take about 100 links to Feitlinger’s comment to raise it into the top 50.

Feitlinger, I should mention, is a Parentsconnect.com reader and commenter who posted the age-old Santa query a while back in an effort to acquire some practical advice about just what to do when the questions regarding Santa’s origin and authenticity eventually surface.

By some course of events this came to the attention of a Sitewire staffer who found the post to be ideal for the agency’s experiment, since the comment appears on a Web page that is not organically optimized.

I’m all for fun activities that can potentially lead to actionable results, so I’m playing along in hopes that some key insights turn up, as well that advice Feitlinger is seeking so I too can tackle the whole Santa thing when my moment of truth arrives.

Sitewire’s Blogonawire post invites us all to lend a hand by participating, and provides simple instructions for doing so.

With that, I wish good tidings to the Sitewire Santa and hope this post brings him a step closer to his goal.

(Well, one more thing while I’m at it. A quick shout out to the Sitewire folks for hosting Charlene Li as the featured speaker at their Groundswell Event this past September. Good stuff!)