my thank you email to @aaronwall for the free SEO advice: great SEO, great guy!
Aaron's a great SEO and he's been giving me free advice for years… really instrumental in helping Mahalo grow! If you are in the need of SEO talent i suggest http://www.wolf-howl.com/ and www.seobook.com!!!
best j
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Jason Calacanis <jason@calacanis.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:41 AM
Subject: thanks!
To: aaron wall thanks for the long post… it's an important discussion.
From: Jason Calacanis <jason@calacanis.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:41 AM
Subject: thanks!
To: aaron wall thanks for the long post… it's an important discussion.
while you did point out that we have these stub pages like wikipedia, the fact is they are < 1% of our traffic and .1% of our revenue. We used to no-index them and we accidentally took that off when we moved to Mahalo 3.0 i think.
it actually HURTS us to have these pages I'm told by multiple SEOs of note because they are not original content and google doesn't rank them AND they spread our page rank.
from what i'm told we're better off building more of our how to pages, walkthroughs and Q&A pages. those are getting us 90%+ of our traffic and revenue.
can you confirm this is a better strategy? i do respect your thoughts on SEO… even though i really don't understand SEO that well.
in fact, the only thing i'm really good at is finding great writers and building a brand. if you search for "VIDEO GAME walkthrough" you'll find we're second only to IGN in 30 short months because our pages are better. same thing with how to articles… we're better than ehow and only second to them in ranking.
any other tips you can give us? really appreciate it pal!
i guess SEO is not BS!!! 
best j
———————
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Office: 310-593-6134 / Mobile: 310-456-4900
Blog: http://www.calacanis.com
Mailing list: http://bit.ly/jasonslist
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jason
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis
Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Office: 310-593-6134 / Mobile: 310-456-4900
Blog: http://www.calacanis.com
Mailing list: http://bit.ly/jasonslist
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jason
AOL IM/Skype: jasoncalacanis
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Huh, when I search for [video game walkthrough], I see you at #10:
http://www.google.com/search?q=video+game+walkthrough&num=10
I see no ads at all for that phrase. And when I look at Google Trends, I see that phrase got slightly less traffic than [pizza seattle]:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=video+game+walkthrough%2C+pizza+seattle
So, that means that in 30 months you just barely made first page for a phrase that no one is bidding on, and that gets less traffic than a single city’s search for pizza.
Seriously, I wouldn’t be boasting your accomplishments until you can learn a little more about the concept of “keyword difficulty”. Anybody can rank… the trick is in learning to rank what everyone else is trying to rank for. In case you didn’t realize it, you’re arguing seo with a guy who is actually *in* the top 10 [seo]. Which has ads. And gets way more searches than either yours or [pizza seattle]:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=video+game+walkthrough%2C+pizza+seattle%2C+seo&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Comment by Michael VanDeMar — January 25, 2010 @ 9:54 pm
PS. Your comment box is a little messed up in Firefox. Slides under the right sidebar when typing.
Also, did you mean that you rank for specific video game names + walkthrough? Just realized you might not mean “video game” as a literal part of the search phrase. If so, then yes, one I checked you did, 2 more you do not. Wasn’t clear exactly what you were meaning, but I really now that all caps might have been your way of saying [insert video game name here].
PPS. Someone just pointed out to me that you might not actually be meaning any of you said in praise to Aaron as sarcastic. If that is so, then nevermind.
Comment by Michael VanDeMar — January 25, 2010 @ 10:08 pm
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