More PROOF Jason Calacanis is a ____
January 30, 2010
Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).
But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF reads like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO.
It includes a slide which highlights how well Mahalo Answers questions rank in Google titled “SEO value,” as well as the following statements (followed by my comments):
- Questions are imported from Partners’ Answers Community into Mahalo Answers, enabling 100% share of voice and high SEO value. (filling Google with duplicate content)
- Category Selection Based on Keyword Intelligence and Customer Goals (doing keyword research, an SEO service)
- Community seeded with high-value questions and answers (does the word “seeded” mean asking fake questions?)
- By carefully policing the site, Mahalo keeps out inappropriate content, thus increasing engagement and utility. (no mention of the half million+ pages indexed in Google which contained scraped 3rd party content?)
- We can help our partners increase their search engine rankings with these high quality pages. (that is the actual text from their slide titled “HowTo”)
- Mahalo’s team of editors will find the most highly-trafficked search terms and keywords for your brand, industry or product and build corresponding high-quality pages that will rank well. (isn’t that exactly what “scummy” SEO companies do Jason?)
Given that Mahalo is now branded as an SEO play (in their own words), and that they scrape millions of content listings to publish on their pages, are creating tons of other duplicate content, have actively engaged in link farming, and are not above “seeding” questions based on keyword value, why should Google trust *any* of their business practices going forward? Especially when their SEO services enterprise was launched on the back of calling SEOs scumbags.
How can the Google web spam team members look themselves in the mirror each morning hunting smaller webmasters and ignoring operations like Mahalo? It must begin to feel arbitrary at some point, no?
Why Mahalo (and Other Content Scrapers) Render Google’s Spam Team Flaccid
January 30, 2010
I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media’s CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: “what if google decides they don’t like you anymore?”
Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just “borrows” your content without permission and keeps all the cash.
In the past Google hated content scrapers pretty bad. How bad? Well a guy named Teeceo used to make scraper sites, and here is how Matt Cutts described his work:
In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.
Imagine taking that approach to hunting search spam all day long, and then ignoring the *fact* that Mahalo is scraping millions of third party listings and using them as content with no editorial filtering.
Then I started thinking about why the Google spam team could ignore something as outrageous as Mahalo, especially when it was built by a guy who was a false anti-spam evangelist. Is it because Jason is a good guy? No. Is it because there is some actual editorial vetting of the content? no. Is it because Google is getting a cut of the AdSense revenues? Google doesn’t need the short term cash flow (look at all the affiliate AdWords advertisers they just torched), so that is too cynical of a view.
Yes Google wants display inventory (their biggest opportunity for 2010 according to the quarterly call), and these “content” websites have already given themselves over to Google as inventory. But it must be something deeper than that. So I started thinking about it from a longterm strategic level…
Google won’t penalize sites like Mahalo (even though they blatantly violate Google’s guidelines) because Google *wants* to use the works of companies like Mahalo, Demand Media, and Aol to lower the value of other content and bankrupt a lot of the traditional media companies.
Why would Google want to do that?
There is excessive duplication in the marketplace. The faster that duplication is driven out of the marketplace the more desperate companies will be to cut deals with Google. And while there is a down market Google can drive companies out of the market and just claim that it was the economy that did it (much like how Mahalo used the down economy as an excuse to fire most of their editorial staff and replace them with content scraping robots).
Once a lot of media companies are bankrupted, the market is far more efficient, and there are fewer mouths to feed, that means Google can squeeze greater profits margins out of the media ecosystem by getting a fatter cut of the ad revenue.
Currently this shift is risk free because almost nobody understands how the marketplace works. Sure Paul Kedrosky and Mike Arrington blogged about the search results getting spammier, but until you frequently read the above listed sequence on sites outside of the SEO industry there is no damage to the Google brand in them turning the internet into a cesspool.
Once it starts harming the Google brand then I suspect them to act quickly and decisively. And sites like Mahalo will see a sharp drop in traffic. Jason better milk it while he can. The clock is ticking.
Starving Artists in the Age of Cesspool Content
January 30, 2010
On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model
Let’s use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.
Let’s say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don’t mention who the band is and on their website, they put up a link to download the song… but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, “hey, playing good songs gets us more listeners and more listeners gets us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let’s do this more often.” So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve.
Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.
In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.
Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.
The analogy isn’t 100% perfect…but it *is* pretty darn close. 
Jason is not 100% Jim McCormick, but he isn’t 0% either.
Whiteboard Friday - Optimizing Topic Pages
January 30, 2010
Posted by great scott!
This week we’re pleased to welcome Marshall Simmonds, CEO of Define Search Strategies and Chief Strategist for the New York Times, to Whiteboard Studios. Whether or not to use topic pages–and how to use them effectively–is a topic of some debate in the SEO world. Well, who better to ask about it than the guy in charge of SEO strategy for the NYT and About.com, two of the topic page-iest sites on the web?
If you’re using a topic page strategy, or you’ve considered it, watch this week’s Whiteboard Friday. Marshall breaks down how and when they can be effective, pros and cons, as well as expenses and advantages to the strategy.
Why Settle for Best Practices?
January 29, 2010
There are differences between best practices and using SEO as a means to achieve the goals of your search marketing strategy. Do you know which method your agency is using? …
Google News Adds “Recrawl” Feature
January 29, 2010
Google News has implemented a recrawl feature that allows the search engine to focus on getting the newest articles. The idea behind recrawling is to insure any changes to new articles are captured.
Most changes happen to articles immediately after they’re published. To deal with the issue, Google implemented the recrawl …
Launching the SEOmoz Free API and Enough Power to Build Open Site Explorer
January 29, 2010
Posted by Nick Gerner
The launch of Open Site Explorer last week opens up a lot of link data, filters, and anchor text to a much wider audience than we’ve ever had before. In that same vein, today we’re announcing our new and improved SEOmoz Free API.
Any registered (it’s free) SEOmoz member can visit our API Portal and get an API key that gives you access to:
- Data for any URL in our index including
- Domain and Page Authority
- mozRank
- total link count
- external, followed link count
- The first 500 links to any page, sub domain or domain
- Filtering on those links: 301s, Follows, External, etc.
- The first 3 domains linking to any page, sub domain or domain
- The first 3 anchor text terms or phrases in links to any page, sub domain or domain
You’re welcome to use this data for private or publicly-facing purposes. We already have a variety of partners integrating this data including:
- Buzzstream
- Brandwatch
- HubSpot’s Grader Suite
- Quirk’s Search Status toolbar
Check out some sample code and applications on the wiki.
Our idea is that getting this data into the hands of webmasters makes everyone better off: we’re excited about our new authority scores, marketers are thirsty for metrics, and users of all kinds of tools are better off with a deeper look at real data. The free package will keep you covered up to a million links per month that you’re free to use for any purpose from consulting to building an SEO campaign management suite.
In addition to the free API (which I think is quite powerful already), we’re expanding our paid API offering. The paid API includes everything above, but also includes:
- Additional metrics:
- number of domains that link to you
- mozTrust
- number of links to all pages on your domain
- and more
- A deeper look at links, way beyond the first 500 (first 100k for each sort per page, domain or sub domain)
- Plenty of sorts on links:
- domain authority
- page authority
- linking root domains
- Way more anchor text terms and phrases (up to 100k per page, domain or sub domain if you’ve got that many)
This is exactly the same API powering Open Site Explorer. So if you think OSE missed a feature, or should include other data sources, you can build it over again and do an even better job :) If you do, drop me a line and I’ll take a look. We’d love to share partner apps on our wiki, Twitter, the blog, and elsewhere.
We don’t even have an attribution requirement. Although, we have a tasty 15% discount if you do cite us as a source 
To sign up, just contact us, and we’ll start the process.
EDIT: The paid API is available outside of a PRO membership. A PRO membership buys the tools, and content, and sweet sweet badge. The paid API is extra. Of course, the free API is both free and full of awesome.
Verifying Google Search Engine Ranking Factors
January 28, 2010
Google search engine ranking factors are among the most important items to check in any SEO work. This will ensure that the strategies formulated are effective current and optimal for the best search engine ranking results. Every search engine optimization analysis examines the website s performance against these important ranking factors. This article series will take a closer look at these factors and find evidence for their existence so you will know that you are on the right track when performing SEO on your website….
Autodesk - Civil 3D - Transportation Accelerate Projects with Integrated Data Sources & Automatic Documentation.
Link Building With a Small Budget
January 28, 2010
Six simple do-it-yourself link marketing strategies. …
AT&T to launch new social recommendations site Buzz.com
January 28, 2010
The social networking market is sizzling these days; with everyone from big to small trying to get a piece. Now the largest telecome company in the U.S wants to take a slice. For the past year and a half, AT&T has been working on a local social networking site called …
