A catch phrase will go here soon.

my thank you email to @aaronwall for the free SEO advice: great SEO, great guy!

1/25/2010

4 comments

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. 

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
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  • http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/ Michael VanDeMar

    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

  • http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/ Michael VanDeMar

    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. :)

  • http://tjoozey.com/?p=2107 Jason Calacanis responds to Aaron from SEO Book

    [...] full post on Hacker News If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it! Tagged with: Aaron • [...]

  • http://explicitly.me/seobook-mahalo-and-google SEOBook Mahalo and Google — Explicitly Me – Rishi Lakhani's Home on the Web

    [...] you should also see this post by Jason Calacanis. Share and [...]

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Hello, my name is Jason. Welcome to my blog on the interwebs. You can reach me on twitter @jason and by email at jason@calacanis.com. My Skype is jasoncalacanis, and my mobile phone is 310-456-4900.

I only pick up numbers I recognize, and in terms of emailing me, the best strategy is to write short, blunt and to the point requests. I can quickly respond to short messages, and many times I simply don't have the time to read five page pitches. In terms of taking meetings, I only do that after reviewing an actual product (not a business plan). So, the best time to ping me is when you have mockups or an alpha site. I don't read business plans, and I've never written one.

Other twitter accounts you can follow: Video Games, Open Angel Forum, and LAUNCH Conference & Newsletter

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