8 ms·

Mahalo Sells Corporate SEO Services?

73 points by jfornear 17y ago

jfornear 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
bonsaitree 17y ago
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#43m http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#... What happened to THAT Jason?
- tomjen2 17y ago
  He properly just saw what happened on wall street. Why make money by working hard to produce value, when you can make more money by going the easy way?
- numair 17y ago
  He moved to LA.
  - jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
    LA is really nice..... like New York City with better weather and a beach. :-)
- joez 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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 17y ago
        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. :-)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- volida 17y ago
  I am surprised you fall in the trap of this guy who attacks Calacanis to change or shape a bad image of him. I don't know anyone of them, and it's obvious this is a personal attack. Who is this guy who will tell someone else how to run their company?
  - bonsaitree 17y ago
    With regards to personal attacks, see my reply below. No management directives were given in the original article, nor my comment. For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate. Although I think it unlikely, Jason himself may not feel he has any other option and is being forced by the other investors in the company down this revenue path. I urge you to read the original article and the previously posted comments on this thread for the full context of Mahlo's behavior and Mr. Calacanis' response. It's the double-speak and clearly disingenuous ignorance of his response which is the crux of the matter.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - volida 17y ago
      Your points only emphasize that this is a personal contrariness, that puts others/us in the middle for no reason, using Calacanis any kind of company tactics from the author's point of view, as an edge to make a public issue. old-fashion publicity trick
      - bonsaitree 17y ago
        I fail to see how there's a "middle" here at all. We're both participants in a public online discussion regarding the behavior of the CEO of a company which, at least for me, I can say I have no legal vested interest or direct financial dealings. Fundamentally, this is between Mr. Calacanis, the management of Mahalo, and Google. We're both mere spectators. By replying personally, Mr. Calacanis chose to make this a personal public issue--in both the original article & this forum. That's entirely within his purview. I'm sure he's experienced enough to know the potential ramifications of those actions.
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
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.
- aaronwall 17y ago
  It is not that providing SEO services is wrong or bad. The point is publicly Jason claims ignorance toward SEO whereas privately SEO is the cornerstone of his sales pitch. It shows is public claims of ignorance toward SEO are (at best) dishonest.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    >>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 17y ago
      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
minalecs 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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-squidoo-0-11671 http://searchengineland.com/search-spam-fight-mahalo-1-squid... (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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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)
FluidDjango 17y ago
Is it possible that JC underrepresents the value of his services - which purport they are "Helping people find information they can trust"? https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf 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 17y ago
  After enough reporters get fired for listening to Jason, I am sure the market will work out that inefficiency ;)
alain94040 17y ago
Nothing shady in that PDF. Looks like someone is holding a grudge.
- aaronwall 17y ago
  Didn't claim the PDF was shady...claimed that lying about being ignorant about SEO while selling SEO services was shady. Big difference.
Tichy 17y ago
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.

73 points by jfornear 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

bonsaitree 17y ago

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#43m http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9192442030075924272#... What happened to THAT Jason?

tomjen2 17y ago
He properly just saw what happened on wall street. Why make money by working hard to produce value, when you can make more money by going the easy way?
numair 17y ago
He moved to LA.
- jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
  LA is really nice..... like New York City with better weather and a beach. :-)
joez 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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. :-)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
volida 17y ago
I am surprised you fall in the trap of this guy who attacks Calacanis to change or shape a bad image of him. I don't know anyone of them, and it's obvious this is a personal attack. Who is this guy who will tell someone else how to run their company?
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  With regards to personal attacks, see my reply below. No management directives were given in the original article, nor my comment. For all we know, this "business model" is being forced upon Mahalo given the present economic climate. Although I think it unlikely, Jason himself may not feel he has any other option and is being forced by the other investors in the company down this revenue path. I urge you to read the original article and the previously posted comments on this thread for the full context of Mahlo's behavior and Mr. Calacanis' response. It's the double-speak and clearly disingenuous ignorance of his response which is the crux of the matter.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - volida 17y ago
    Your points only emphasize that this is a personal contrariness, that puts others/us in the middle for no reason, using Calacanis any kind of company tactics from the author's point of view, as an edge to make a public issue. old-fashion publicity trick
    - bonsaitree 17y ago
      I fail to see how there's a "middle" here at all. We're both participants in a public online discussion regarding the behavior of the CEO of a company which, at least for me, I can say I have no legal vested interest or direct financial dealings. Fundamentally, this is between Mr. Calacanis, the management of Mahalo, and Google. We're both mere spectators. By replying personally, Mr. Calacanis chose to make this a personal public issue--in both the original article & this forum. That's entirely within his purview. I'm sure he's experienced enough to know the potential ramifications of those actions.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

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.

aaronwall 17y ago
It is not that providing SEO services is wrong or bad. The point is publicly Jason claims ignorance toward SEO whereas privately SEO is the cornerstone of his sales pitch. It shows is public claims of ignorance toward SEO are (at best) dishonest.
jasonmcalacanis 17y ago
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 17y ago
  >>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 17y ago
    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

minalecs 17y ago

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 17y ago
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-squidoo-0-11671 http://searchengineland.com/search-spam-fight-mahalo-1-squid... (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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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)

FluidDjango 17y ago

Is it possible that JC underrepresents the value of his services - which purport they are "Helping people find information they can trust"? https://mahalo-press.s3.amazonaws.com/MahaloPressKit.pdf 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 17y ago
After enough reporters get fired for listening to Jason, I am sure the market will work out that inefficiency ;)

alain94040 17y ago

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

aaronwall 17y ago
Didn't claim the PDF was shady...claimed that lying about being ignorant about SEO while selling SEO services was shady. Big difference.

Tichy 17y ago

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.