

Jason Calacanis responds to Aaron from SEO Book - ashishk
http://calacanis.com/2010/01/25/my-thank-you-email-to-aaronwall-for-the-free-seo-advice-great-seo-great-guy/

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aaronwall
"We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape-
generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics."

Well, when doing a site search in Google for site:mahalo.com "Links Powered by
Google" there are 553,000 pages ___indexed in Google_ __which are using
scraped search result content (with optimized page titles) to help pull in
traffic.[http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powered+by+Google)

and keep in mind that is just links from Google...there are also chunks of
content from Google blog search, Twitter, and other sources (images, videos,
news) on those pages

he is full of ____ if he is trying to get anyone to buy that doing the above
is responsible for less than 1% of their traffic when Compete.com shows their
search referral traffic as being ~ 60% of their referrals

It is not just a few (thousand) 100% auto-generated
(experiment/stub/zebra/spam) pages that have scraped content on them...the
above search shows Google estimates over a half million pages in their index
contain content from their own search index...total regurgitation of 3rd party
content :D

And lets not forget that 1.) he is using people's optimized page titles as
content on his pages 2.) search traffic monetizes better via ads than other
traffic forms...especially the search traffic that lands on a page for some
random longtail keyword made up by arbitrarily combining chunks of 3rd party
content mixed together and re-aggregated. 3.) in addition, there is a $0
editorial cost to scraping these millions and millions of content snippets and
re-displaying them. 4.) he is making at least 5 figures a day from that
content scraping...with 100% certainty.

his 1% remark is just another form of misinformation. nothing new there!

~~~
vaksel
precisely, I think this is a perfect page for what he is doing:

<http://www.mahalo.com/card-games>

SEVEN powered by Google areas.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Our pages are built by our community, so the quality will vary. That page
doesn't have a "vertical manager" yet, but it will. Then we would build out
the content a little more.

It's not a perfect system, people can't put multiple search boxes in there.

However, that page will never rank well in a search engine (unless by a
fluke). In order to rank well you really need to have 500+ original words.

We're in the process of moving all pages to that standard. It's really a self-
regulating thing: if our contributors make short pages they never rank and
never make money. They get frustrated and we teach them how to make longer
pages and some day they may rank.

... it's really not a problem, and the truth is we rank for three things well:

1\. video game walkthroughs (typically 2-10,000 words!) 2\. how to articles
(typically 800 to 5,000 words) 3\. question & answer pages (typically 300 to
10,000 words),

Isn't this basic SEO (and i'm not expert): build original content and you
might rank. Build short pages, you don't rank.

All pages start short (just like wikipedia stubs do), and over time we make
them longer. that's the normal process.

~~~
trevelyan
Why has Jason's comment has been downvoted? People don't consider it relevant?
Amazing.

~~~
evgen
It is relevant, but I believe the downvotes are a response to the lack of an
option to otherwise flag a comment as complete bullshit.

------
kyro
Uh, that's not a response to Aaron's article. That's Jason acting naive and
oblivious to dodge the accusations, and taking on this whole 'aww shucks, can
you help me out a bit?' attitude to shift the discussion and get on Aaron's
good side. If you had a case against what you were accused of doing, you
would've published a well thought-out article, much like some of the articles
you've written that have been on subjects you're clearly confident and well-
versed in. But you have nothing this time.

Also, stating that such pages only amount to less than 1% of your revenue is
in no way a justification of the content theft you're committing. You're
cowardly sidestepping the issue. What have you got to say about the actual
content theft, rebranding of such content as Mahalo's, and knocking down the
original authors of that content by skipping on the credits and outranking
them?

You got caught, dude.

~~~
dangrossman
Have to agree, this is a non-response. That only validates that a real
response would not be a good thing for the company.

------
Towle_
Semi-unrelated to the actual content of this particular post: (I apologize
about that, by the way)

Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

He's often propped up as some sort of guru/authority/etc. of start-ups and the
Web in general, and I just don't see it at all. I've never read any words of
his and felt like a smarter or more knowledgeable person afterward; I only
ever see rather mundane platitudes.

Perhaps I just haven't read the right pieces of his? If anyone believes this
might the case, please consider responding to this post with a link or two.
I'm seriously very baffled by his image (and to be honest, I don't think
highly of Mahalo as a concept, for many various reasons I won't detail here
unless someone is interested in them).

~~~
davidw
> Am I the only one who simply can't stand Jason Calacanis?

One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would
feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical
because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it
appears.

That said, I get a bad vibe too: why is everything he is associated with
seemingly "Jason's this" or "Jason's that". Generally, a startup is known
first and foremost as the company, not as "Alexis Ohanian's Reddit" or "Sergey
Brin's Google", but you _always_ find that guy's name in the same phrase as
Mahalo. I can't quite place my finger on why this bugs me, but perhaps it's
something to do with building something up as a free standing entity versus
lending your famous name to something.

~~~
Towle_
>One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you
would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical
because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it
appears.

You know, despite being a total noob here, I still thought I had that one
checked off on my list of things to watch for...until of course Jason himself
showed up on the board (assuming it's really him, of course). I really did not
see that coming. But what can I do now other than apologize and hope he wasn't
offended? Sorry, Jason. :) No real defamation intended, just wanted to open a
discussion on the validity of the opinions you propagate.

~~~
davidw
I think it's still quite possible to say negative things to/about people, but
it really helps to imagine saying them directly to the person in question.

~~~
Towle_
Right, of course. I didn't mean to imply that I thought it a mistake to be
critical, just regretted and apologized for the manner in which I criticized.

Thanks again, David.

------
newsio
Jason is full of it. Playing stupid and meek because he got caught.

The original SEO book post and HN discussion are here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723>

EDITED: Added correct link (thanks icey!)

~~~
icey
Your link is weird for me - it takes me to page 2 of the listings instead of a
specific posting.

I think this is what you meant to link to:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723>

------
krtl
"we accidentally took that off when we moved to Mahalo 3.0 i think." Jason is
the last person who would accidentally make a move like that. Its all planed.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
It's actually true... we can make mistakes.

... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's
why i no indexed them to being with.

Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is
something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank
to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of
original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a
blog.

We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting
it back on because we didn't realize it was off.

That is why I thanked Aaron.

Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly
certain thing: only index the best pages.

~~~
krtl
Thats fair. Theres no denying Jason is good at what he does and understands
the web business better than most. I feel like this is an opportunity for
those on HN to learn the way he rolls and manages his business.

Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo
accounts for less than .1% .. I think this is more Google's issue than
Mahalo's.

~~~
Psyonic
"Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature,
Mahalo accounts for less than .1%"

Huh? I'm not sure which way I stand on this whole mess, but the fact that he
makes up a tiny portion of the "spam" doesn't seem relevant? Is a petty thief
less bad because he accounts for less than .00001% of theft in the world?

------
ErrantX
Regardless of who is right/wrong here this strikes me as a very glib response
to quite a serious accusation levelled at his business practices.

To me it doesn't seem to help his credibility.

------
qeorge
If Jason really wants advice, here's two things:

1) "Spreading our PageRank" is BS. More pages == more total PageRank.
Wikipedia's summary isn't half bad: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank>

2) Remove the nofollow's from the attribution links to content you've scraped.
Anything else is just plain rude.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but they are
smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are google's.

so, i think you have the issue confused.

Also, on #1 I think most SEOs would say your wrong. More pages does NOT equal
more page rank. It's the EXACT opposite.

MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top SEOs
have told me. I hope this helps with your site.

all the best,

Jason

~~~
qeorge
Jason, I'm quite sure I'm not confused.

1) _"MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top
SEOs have told me. "_

For this purpose, indexed by Google counts as "quality." Please read the
PageRank paper, and you'll quickly see that more pages in the index == more
PageRank.

That doesn't always mean putting crap pages into Google is a good idea, but
strictly speaking, it will raise the total amount of PageRank your site has.
Seriously, read the paper yourself.

2) _"but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but
they are smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are
google's."_

Perhaps scrape is the wrong term. But you absolutely do include other people's
content and nofollow it, for example all of the images on this page:

<http://www.mahalo.com/chupacabra>

NoFollow is meant for links to content which you don't want to "vouch" for. If
you've included their content in your page, I think you can vouch for it.

Maybe an honest oversight, maybe not. Either way, you know about it now, so
fix it.

------
aresant
Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired.

Mahalo is a great money printing machine, but come on, those are pages
designed to do one thing - rip content quickly, monetize, and SPAM google.

~~~
webignition
_Jason's sweeping "it's less than <1%" comments are getting tired._

We can't tell whether Jason is misleading us about the proportion of scrape-
generated pages on Mahalo without access to any Mahalo page statistics.

I'm not for or against Jason on this matter, I'm just saying that we have no
data on which to base any conclusions. It's _possible_ he's telling the truth.

It would be interesting for someone to take up the challenge of creating a
small web app that finds all Mahalo URLs, heuristically examines them for
spamminess and generates some statistics.

Not that such an app would be of any particular long term use, but it might be
interesting nonetheless.

------
ashu
Google, any comment?

------
FreeRadical
To be honest it was quite a dignified response, I was expecting something with
more 'fire' when I clicked the link.

~~~
aresant
I think that the overly "I love you man" tone of his response indicates to me
that he's thumbing his nose at the situation and just being a bit of an ass.

~~~
mahmud
The passive-aggressive bromance is a classic deflection trick.

