

Mahalo Sells Corporate SEO Services?  - jfornear
http://www.seobook.com/more-proof-jason-calacanis

======
bonsaitree
There's smart, shrewd, duplicitous, deceptive, and finally downright
dishonest. I don't know the man personally, but it's my opinion that Mr.
Calacanis's business practices moved into that final category some time ago.

It's actually really sad. I wonder what's driven him to this level. Greed?
Ego? 3rd party investor pressure? Simply not wanting to ever have his name
associated with a repeat failure?

Especially amongst the entrepreneur crowd which he espouses to represent,
truthful "honest" failure itself is looked upon less harshly than shady "gamed
success".

Though in retrospect totally full of late 90s Internet hype, I remember being
inspired by his Charlie Rose interview back in the "Silcon Alley" days of NYC:

[http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#...](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#43m)

What happened to THAT Jason?

~~~
joez
I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think
since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the
positives he's done for the startup community.

Techcrunch50

This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)

~~~
bonsaitree
Unfortunately, as is the case with Mahalo, when one is both the CEO and
"public face" of a corporation's brand, it is difficult partition the two
relms outside of clearly personal matters (e.g. health, friends, family,
etc.). A classic case being Martha Stewart.

In some instances, with morality and 'key executive personnel' insurance
clauses in compensation agreements, they are, in fact, inextricably
contractually coupled. As the saying goes, "it comes with the territory" and
I'm sure is adequately reflected in his ownership of the company and current
compensation.

Also, FWIW, I don't believe this was his original plan (e.g. Mahalo Daily's
original format hosted by Veronica Belmont). Nevertheless, that's been the
situation for years and Jason, and his board, have apparently seen no good
reason to change it.

~~~
NZ_Matt
I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with
quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage
instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised
the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This
means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first
and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the
number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience.
They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will
click on an ad when leaving.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Not exactly.... take a look at the how to articles, walkthroughs, buzz news on
the homepage and Q&A community. We're doing some amazing content and Aaron is
focusing on short pages that are not ranked in any search engine and, that
frankly, we don't let folks build any more (we started with an open system
like wikipedia where anyone could build and build they did... now we have a
system like MTurk where you have to complete the page before we publish it).

the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a
page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out.

so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia
terms).

however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long
tail ones.... and even that is rare.

google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated.

Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad
at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)

~~~
jordanb
PEOPLE, QUIT DOWN-VOTING THIS MAN!

I'm that much of a hacker news user, but I come around here enough to know
that this site prides itself on reasoned discussions. We're all supposed to be
thinking adults, we can politely read what he has to say and decide for
ourselves if he's full of it or not.

We don't need the mob doing the internet version of throwing rotten fruit at
him.

------
jfornear
I always did find it funny that the CEO of a so-called "human-powered search
engine" could get away with claiming to not understand SEO.

~~~
staunch
The fantasy version of Mahalo is that some people (your grandma) would use
Mahalo as their interface to Google. Mahalo would intercept the top n% of
queries with better results, and pass the rest on to Google.

The reality is that getting _anyone_ to switch to Mahalo as their destination
search engine is nigh impossible. So, they go back to their real plan: create
a crappy Wikipedia-like site for tabloid content and rely on SEO to get page
views and fill those with ads. Use the human powered search as a legitimate
cover. But that's just my opinion.

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minalecs
I don't quite understand the issue, but I think the conflict being , is that
because google loves content and backlinks , he had first built a service
under the disguise of just being a legitimate human powered search, and can
now leverage his network to give credibility to other links for the highest
price ? Can anybody else provide more context ?

~~~
aaronwall
The other non-trivial relevant issue was that at launch time he panned Squidoo
as spam

flamed Squidoo in the mainstream press so often that he got them penalized
[http://searchengineland.com/search-spam-fight-
mahalo-1-squid...](http://searchengineland.com/search-spam-fight-
mahalo-1-squidoo-0-11671) (all so he could promote Mahalo)

....

fast forward the clock a couple years and Jason is operating well outside of
Google's guidelines, massively auto-generating scraped content web pages. The
auto-generating scraped pages are far worse than anything Squidoo ever did.

Jason publicly claims an ignorance of SEO to act like he doesn't know any
better, then inside his corporate sales material the key selling point is SEO.

How can he both be ignorant of SEO and use it as his key selling point?

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
We are well within Google's guidelines.

We are noindexing the pages that have short content and are older than 30
days. If they are less than 30 days old and get more than 50 views we build
them out.

That's just a smart strategy, and there is nothing black hat of it.

Also, 90% of our traffic comes from Q&A, walkthroughs and howto articles that
are REALLY DEEP in terms of content.

~~~
aaronwall
Google has publicly given warnings against search results within search
results and scraper content websites.

And time and again you have had scraper pages wind up in the search results
against the search engine guidelines with various excuses each time. On those
types of pages Google states "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search
engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with
little or no original content." so no...those are not at all within the
guidelines (or even the spirit of the guidelines).

Syndicating content without asking permission and providing no way to opt out
and putting nofollow on the links is also a quite dirty business practice.

Keep in mind that scraper sites are not something you learned from me. If
someone like me puts up a site like that it is burned almost immediately.
Whereas your site has been scraping content for years. (I have never ran any
scraper sites, but when Teeceo did what you are doing Matt Cutts described it
as "shoot on sight" publicly on his blog)

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
... but we don't put search results within search results!

We target put 300-500+ original words on each page we index--just like a
newspaper or blog.

I know this is highly personally for you, but you don't have to make things up
Aaron!

Also:

1\. Google is VERY smart about how people can try to game the system and they
WILL NOT RANK pages with low content value--you know this!

2\. In the small number of cases when a page manager makes a small content
page we build it out the SECOND IT GETS OVER 25-50 views.

We WANT TO HAVE high quality pages and we produce a ton of them every day. We
DON'T want short pages because google will penalize you for them.

We used to remove this pages from the index with nofollow and that got removed
by accident--not that it matters because GOOGLE IS SMART and doesn't rank them
anyway.

We are going to have them all noindexed again just so you will move your hate
and venom on to someone else..... also because it will help our page rank!

that's the irony of this.... if we don't have these short pages we will DO
BETTER! That's why we noindexed them to being with.

So, for that, I thank you for the free SEO of advice.

Also, you will be happy to know that you attention has sent us some more
quality writers who want to take part in our revenue sharing content system,
as well as a client who wants to work with our Q&A/knowledge platform.

if you were a sales person i would have to pay you a fat commission... instead
I'll buy you a dinner and a couple of beers at the next SMX so you can chill
out.

seriously dude... chill, life is short! worry about the people in Haiti or the
fact that the iPad doesn't have a USB port!

~~~
logical
"but we don't put search results within search results!"

Here are some examples of pages with no original content and many times the
content on the top of the page is from search results:

<http://www.mahalo.com/moding> <http://www.mahalo.com/grammar>
<http://www.mahalo.com/phonograms> <http://www.mahalo.com/porn2girls>
<http://www.mahalo.com/idahosex> <http://www.mahalo.com/guddagudda>
<http://www.mahalo.com/forumbi> <http://www.mahalo.com/guerradechistes>
<http://www.mahalo.com/rajaleelai> <http://www.mahalo.com/chiba>
<http://www.mahalo.com/matahariku>

Pages that have original content, but much less than 300 original words:
<http://www.mahalo.com/svu> <http://www.mahalo.com/plumpynut>

I'm sure I could generate a very large list of pages that fall into either of
these categories.

I understand that Aaron might have some personal issues with you, but it
doesn't appear that he is making this stuff up.

------
FluidDjango
Is it possible that JC _under_ represents the value of his services - which
purport they are "Helping people find information they can trust"?

<https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf> :

Perhaps Mahalo will (at no extra charge) help steer people away from secret
pre-release details about Apple mobile devices.

~~~
aaronwall
After enough reporters get fired for listening to Jason, I am sure the market
will work out that inefficiency ;)

------
jasonlbaptiste
In this specific presentation Mahalo is advertising a platform for how-to
guides and answer services that can be used on other sites - how is that
wrong? Google is about producing good content that's relevant and useful.
Mahalo does that along with the right linking structure in place. If I was
paying someone to help create content+an engine around it I'd find SEO to be
an important sales point worth touching on.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Correct!

We make great content and tools for companies and they happen to be excellent
at SEO.

I love SEO and Aaron is just going insane because he thinks I am a better SEO
than he is.

Now, I don't think I'm better at SEO than Aaron.. in fact, most of what I've
learned is from reading his blog and GREY Wolf's!

So, I don't understand why he is so full of venom for me when I always give
him credit as a great inspiration for me!

~~~
aaronwall
>>Aaron is just going insane because he thinks I am a better SEO than he is<<

When you back out the VC influx of cash I am not so sure. :D

I think you are _great_ at public relations, but I didn't have to flame people
or take funding to build huge traffic streams.

I started out with lots of debt, no revenues, and a credit card and grew from
there. And I only have ~ 6.5 years online...imagine my public relations Qi I
will develop by the time I am a ripe old man like yourself :D

I mean...you're like 40!!!

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
I wish you great success with your career.... and the sooner you stop sweating
me you'll be on your way. Seriously, it's a waste of your time to worry about
what I'm doing when you could be taking notes and building something even
better.

If you think that Engadget, TechCrunch50, Open Angel Forum, This Week in
Startups, Joystiq, Autoblog, Mahalo and my other projects are so flawed, well,
make better ones!

Also, I would seriously consider building something of lasting value beyond
just SEO. You're clearly very capable and you clearly have the OCD of a
potentially great entrepreneur.... point it at a big problem.

best jason

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Tichy
Who cares if he is ignorant about SEO or not? I don't see the big deal. And
even if he is ignorant, he could have employees who do the SEO stuff.

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alain94040
Nothing shady in that PDF. Looks like someone is holding a grudge.

~~~
aaronwall
Didn't claim the PDF was shady...claimed that lying about being ignorant about
SEO _while_ selling SEO services was shady.

Big difference.

