It is possible to create all kinds of search mashups and have something similar.

That link to me on the advertorial however is what threw me, and not because it stroked my ego.

The page must have been worked on carefully because it was linked from their what is pages.

If someone created a mashup, there is currently no way that page would currently appear for the search term Advertorial, because it isn’t optimized enough.
I saw similar situations on other pages.

This suggests to me that the researchers are monitoring coverage on their chosen or assigned topics, and have been for months, and will continue to do so.
This isn’t a “set and forget” process. Each researcher is probably assigned 100-200 keywords and they continually improve the results for those pages.

If you read my overall coverage of all things Jason Calacanis the balance is still negative.

My review started off critical because that was the mindset I had when I approached this review “going in”.

I was looking for bias, I was looking for negative factors. It is extremely hard to remain objective with so much water under the bridge.

I have read people who have created “Made For Adsense” sites criticise this as being purely a “Made For Adsense” site.

From what I have read, Jason currently has 40 researchers, and they have been working since the start of the year.

Whilst they might have 4000 pages, none of them are looked on as complete works, very few are claimed to be higher than 60% complete.

Lets assume 250 working days a year x 40 people = 10000 working days.

Jason looks to have 10000 pages created this year.

If the researchers are spending a full working day (in total) on each page, and leveraging suggestions from the public, that is certainly a fair amount more work than your typical MFA invests in each page.

That isn’t allowing for growth in staffing levels. It is quite possible Jason will increase the staff 2x or 3x this year, as he has the funding to do it.

It is too early to say whether it is going to be successful, but it is a legitimate attempt to achieve a goal.

Mahalo for the feedback, and for being the first one to read the terms of service! The TOS was “borrowed” with permission from Twitter. I email Ev and Biz over there and they were cool with us building from their template. We are cool with people building form our template. No reason for us (i.e. every web startup) to start over with stuff like that when we can evolve it together.

For the record, I don’t like the idea of stealing folks IP so if that ever happens you can assume it was an accident.

RE: Those meta tags in your first point those were a hangover from the first homepage we build which did have fity cent on it. Our bad, thanks for looking at our code! We will fix.

re: “it isn’t that smart to stick nofollow on all the links on a page that is effectively your sitemap.”

That is ANOTHER error on our part… again, MAHALO for pointing it out!

In terms of editorial control of the site I have NONE. I hire smart folks and I give them the tools to do the best job possible. If I do something really stupid you can be sure they will put it right up on my SERP!

Of course we don’t put NOFOLLOW on the SERPS… the people on their have EARNED their links by impressing our guides with their excellent sites. Now, the links in the suggested links from users should have NOFOLLOW–until such time as the editors move them over to the main serp.

Nice write-up, check out stuntdubl for more of the same

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