7 ms·

Jason Calacanis responds to Aaron from SEO Book

86 points by ashishk 17y ago

aresant 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
newsio 17y ago
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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723 EDITED: Added correct link (thanks icey!)
- icey 17y ago
  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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723
FreeRadical 17y ago
To be honest it was quite a dignified response, I was expecting something with more 'fire' when I clicked the link.
- aresant 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    The passive-aggressive bromance is a classic deflection trick.
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
    not the intention... not thumbing my nose at Aaron. he's great ask Fisking someone and I'm willing to hear him out and do a better job if there is merit to his arguments. I'm also willing to jump into this mud pit and get my ass kicked by you guys. :-)
- aaronwall 17y ago
  the response was condescending...he made it sound like it was my SEO tips he followed to create that site...trying to cast blame onto me. you can also tell how insincere he was in that his recommendation never hit the homepage of his site...he didn't want certain people to see it
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  -1 for being logical! :-)
aaronwall 17y ago
"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++Powered+by+Google http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powe... 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 17y ago
  precisely, I think this is a perfect page for what he is doing: http://www.mahalo.com/card-games http://www.mahalo.com/card-games SEVEN powered by Google areas.
  - anApple 17y ago
    Seven? I could spot 8 seperate google text ad blocks and 3 graphical google ad blocks.
    - 17y ago
krtl 17y ago
"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.
- aaronwall 17y ago
  exactly. and he had the exact same issue with the exact same site in the past http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png so I am 100% positive it was intentional
  - krtl 17y ago
    His business would come crashing down if he admits even to an inch of this. I have to respect that he knows how to run his business and respond to these types of concerns that are raised about his ethics. But that still doesn't excuse the facts.
    - anApple 17y ago
      Google should simply pull the plug. Internet users would benefit more from this than pulling the plug from google.cn.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  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.
  - 17y ago
Towle_ 17y ago
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).
- runevault 17y ago
  From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it. After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.
  - aaronwall 17y ago
    His strongest skills are hype & public relations. AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company. Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 (maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
    - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
      gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny. Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out. so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer. to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work. You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently. A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands. Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here. your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you! Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners. I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times. what is it going to take to make you happy?
kyro 17y ago
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.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- dangrossman 17y ago
  Have to agree, this is a non-response. That only validates that a real response would not be a good thing for the company.
ErrantX 17y ago
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 17y ago
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 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.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > Remove the nofollow's from the attribution links to content you've scraped. Anything else is just plain rude. I think this is a question we all, other [slightly petty] arguments aside, want to hear an answer to. I doubt we will though - care to prove us wrong Jason?
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 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.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
ashu 17y ago
Google, any comment?

86 points by ashishk 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

newsio 17y ago

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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723 EDITED: Added correct link (thanks icey!)

icey 17y ago
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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073723

FreeRadical 17y ago

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

aresant 17y ago
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 17y ago
  The passive-aggressive bromance is a classic deflection trick.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  not the intention... not thumbing my nose at Aaron. he's great ask Fisking someone and I'm willing to hear him out and do a better job if there is merit to his arguments. I'm also willing to jump into this mud pit and get my ass kicked by you guys. :-)
aaronwall 17y ago
the response was condescending...he made it sound like it was my SEO tips he followed to create that site...trying to cast blame onto me. you can also tell how insincere he was in that his recommendation never hit the homepage of his site...he didn't want certain people to see it
jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
-1 for being logical! :-)

aaronwall 17y ago

"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++Powered+by+Google http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amahalo.com+Links++Powe... 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 17y ago
precisely, I think this is a perfect page for what he is doing: http://www.mahalo.com/card-games http://www.mahalo.com/card-games SEVEN powered by Google areas.
- anApple 17y ago
  Seven? I could spot 8 seperate google text ad blocks and 3 graphical google ad blocks.
  - 17y ago

krtl 17y ago

"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.

aaronwall 17y ago
exactly. and he had the exact same issue with the exact same site in the past http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png so I am 100% positive it was intentional
- krtl 17y ago
  His business would come crashing down if he admits even to an inch of this. I have to respect that he knows how to run his business and respond to these types of concerns that are raised about his ethics. But that still doesn't excuse the facts.
  - anApple 17y ago
    Google should simply pull the plug. Internet users would benefit more from this than pulling the plug from google.cn.
jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
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.
- 17y ago

Towle_ 17y ago

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).

runevault 17y ago
From what I've seen/read, it seems like his strongest skill is finding the right people and letting them do their job and excel at it. After all without people building the content/handling things, Weblogs inc wouldn't have been such a hot property that sold to AOL for however much money it ended up selling for.
- aaronwall 17y ago
  His strongest skills are hype & public relations. AOL was mainly buying into the trend of blogging / lower cost content production models when they bought Weblogs, Inc. They didn't buy a huge cash generating company. Jason was bragging about having about a million a year in revenues (revenues, not profits) with some absurdly large number of writers (like 30). And part of that cash flow was selling text links that flow PageRank to online casinos...over 100 of them carpet-bombed his network of blogs. http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6312 And (ironically) back then he was also selling links to scraper sites http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5295 (maybe that is where the Mahalo idea came from)?
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
    gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny. Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out. so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer. to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work. You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently. A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands. Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here. your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you! Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners. I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times. what is it going to take to make you happy?

kyro 17y ago

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.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
dangrossman 17y ago
Have to agree, this is a non-response. That only validates that a real response would not be a good thing for the company.

ErrantX 17y ago

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 17y ago

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 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.

ErrantX 17y ago
> Remove the nofollow's from the attribution links to content you've scraped. Anything else is just plain rude. I think this is a question we all, other [slightly petty] arguments aside, want to hear an answer to. I doubt we will though - care to prove us wrong Jason?
jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 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.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

ashu 17y ago

Google, any comment?