I am not going to portray Mahalo as some kind of “sacred ground”, and I have been a little negative about Mahalo in the past, but it does offer ePerks the opportunity to submit links, hopefully not from anonymous sources, of people happy with their service.

Mahalo I am sure will validate links, and if they seem to be from an anonymous shill blog on WordPress.com, my hope is that they will be removed as spam. I am sure Mahalo editors won’t want to include any paid reviews, unless they are of exceptional quality.

Here we go, one great reputation passing link to ePerks on Mahalo

At the same time I would like to go on record that I suspect the person who created the first link on Mahalo for ePerks might be connected with the company, or their admirer who is attacking Vlad and I have passed on to Jason my suspicions that the IP address might be in the 76.206.0.160 to 76.206.0.167 range, and thus evidence.

You will note that the ePerks page is currently a stub page (with meta robots noindex nofollow), so needs lots of link suggestions. If you can think of any links worth mentioning, don’t forget to add them. Jason has already added a couple of links himself.

One section of this post contained totally false statements regarding a competition by Mahalo, but many bloggers offer similar incentives for links. The section in italics were the fabricated parts of this entry.

I am adjusting this post now that in some parts of the world it has now passed midday on 1st April.

Original Title: Mahalo For The Air

Did you see Jason Calacanis with his incentivized signup program for Twitter, in a bid to take his “Jason Army” above 20,000?

All those twitterroll links are having a significant effect on the highly competitive “Jason Calacanis” SERP.

Stage two in the plan is even more devious…

Mahalo MacBook Air Giveaway

I think this is especially appropriate with April 1st being the day without Google

What Is Acceptable?

I don’t honestly know, and Google rarely tell us anything

Lots of people offer incentives for links in prize giveaways, though maybe not on the scale of 100s or 1000s or MacBook Airs
It is frequent practice by many to offer incentives to add them as a friend on various social media platforms. This can be looked on purely as a way of adding more subscribers, but many of these platforms are indexed by Google, and the links to your profile count and give more juice. If you want to maximise your social media profiles in the SERPs for reputation management, that is one cheap quick method.

That might be acceptable if you are just trying to boost the SERP of a page for Andy Beard, or in Jason’s case “Jason Calacanis”, but what happens if your twitter account is Online Casino News, and you offer a MacBook Air for every 1000 subscribers, instead of every 20,000.
50 MacBook Airs for 50,000 profile links, plus I am sure more media attention. Maybe a first page result for Online Casino SERPs.

That could protentially be worth the $100,000 investment, and you might not need to be quite so generous, plus you would have 50,000 subscribers.

So while you are attacking affiliate marketing, please ensure you have first of all cleared up all the problems in the paid links debate, such as what seems to be a company, where you are on the board of directors, buying links.

It is widely discussed that buying links in WordPress themes is something that might be a signal of web spam, and the same should be true for buying links in WordPress plugins and gaining millions of links.

Of all the default options within the original Sociable plugin, quite honestly the ThisNext button appearing by default is the least obvious choice, thus most likely to have been paid for.

When approached about making the links nofollow, the developer refused – he seemed to think all those links to forms were a deserved vote.

I took action, encouraging people to add nofollow initially, and then releasing a modified version of the sociable plugin.

That version is relatively unknown – only downloaded 1700 or so times, I am sure the original has been downloaded upwards of 100,000 times.

Recently Joost decided to take over development of Sociable and create a new “official” version

I did make sure that the default options were changed.

Not As Bad As It Used To Be

Fortunately this situation isn’t as bad as it used to be, otherwise I honestly wouldn’t raise it in so open a manner.

ThisNext now has someone on board or was made aware of this issue and has made a specific point to block the URL from search engines

Disallow: /pick/new/submit/

That may not be the case of the other default inclusions

But it is deceptive to users – those are purchased links, and there is no form of disclosure on the page that they are paid advertising.

For a long time those pages were not blocked

Deja Vu

These are really old conversations but highly relevant to the current

There have been extensive discussions regarding the differences in disclosure in various blogging scenarios including with Gordon Gould of ThisNext after the interview between Jason and Ted from Izea (formerly PayPerPost)

Clickbank have required disclosure for more than a year now, though they leave it to the FTC to decide what level of disclosure is required.

Google still prevent disclosure of their referral units.

I have been writing about affiliate disclosure for some time

When Jason asks “Should Google, Yahoo, Mahalo, etc. ban affiliate links? (or “Will the FTC ban undisclosed affiliate links for us all?”)” his first port of call should be companies where he has a say in what they do, then his friends at Google.

Jason should also look into other forms of payola, and his own linking practice

For full coverage of Jason’s presentation at Affiliate Summit read

Sam’s blow by blow live blogging
Reaction to JC on ReveNews
Scott Jangro’s take – he agrees with a lot of Jason’s sentiment
Kieron also agrees with a lot that was said, and looks for long term value.

Linda has a full roundup of all posts, along with a player so you can listen to a recording on Webmaster radio

Zac was under fire over his big checks and responds

Finally Tris has probably the clearest takeaways from the Jason Calacanis keynote at Affiliate Summit

Maybe more coverage on techmeme, but currently most of the above posts have all the links covered.

Update

I found Joel Comm’s views extremely interesting (p.s. Joel – if you had linked to a few more people I would have found your post quicker)

Good overview on Winning The Web

Finally Dan Rua with quite a scathing look at Jason Calacanis’ linking practice, with #1 rankings for Mahalo content being driven purely with links from the Jason Calacanis weblog.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate marketer, I also get classed as an SEO by many – this is a topic I am extremely biased about and have commercial interests in. I have been involved in the disclosure debate for affiliate marketing for over a year.

I discovered this touching remark from Wikia and Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales about Jason Calacanis…

With all the links Mahalo gives Wikipedia you would think there would be a little more love…

I wonder how long it will take for Wikia to have some quality content on competitive search terms.

Anyway one paragraph interested me

One of the most important parts of the QC and serping process is making sure the sites we link to on Mahalo do not have scraped or stolen content, that is, the sites do not take content from another source without attribution. We also don’t want to link to sites that borrow content from other sources with attribution if we can link to the original source instead.

I would like to applaud Mahalo for this concerted effort not to link to Wikipedia any more.

Wikipedia by their own charter does not contain any original material, and worse, they don’t give search engine readable links to their sources of information (thus potentially inflating their position in the search results compared to their sources)

Just copy the links and nothing else from the bottom of each Wikipedia article, make sure you remove the nofollow, and there will immediately be better content on Mahalo.

Of course it would be necessary to verify the links, but after that the link to Wikipedia can be dumped, as it is just the link URLs for which Wikipedia have no copyright claim.

Additional bonus – you would gain a little more credibility with your arch enemies (The snake oil SEO scumbags) by actually doing something they might agree with.

All words in this article in italics should be taken with a little bit of sarcasm

Here is the full “SEO Podcast” show which I also posted and discussed one month ago.
You can skip watching the whole thing, I have included an excerpt further down the page

However I want to concentrate on one small part of that discussion and unfortunately even when you have the whole podcast cached in the Podtech player, it doesn’t seem possible, at least on my system, to fast forward to the section I want to concentrate on.
So using their video player I wouldn’t be able to tell you to skip to a particular segment.

Podtech list all kinds of usage restrictions

I am including an excerpt for the following reasons

• The technical ability not to be able to skip to the part of the show I need to reference
• I need to use a small fragment of the whole in what could be looked on as a journalistic capacity, but I am not a journalist
• The section of the conversation I want to use includes what I personally said, and Jason’s response directly to me.
• What was said is an integral part of my ability to report on current events

So here is an excerpt along with some interesting clips

This signals a change in focus by Mahalo, possibly prompted by one of the key issues I had with Mahalo, that the content wasn’t Diggable.

Jason certainly seems to have taken that concept to heart, and is now competing against the sites he is listing as “quality search results”.

Mahalo was meant to be a “search engine” – Google is a search engine, they don’t create content – Mahalo is no longer just a search engine

Mahalo is now competing against content sites such as Lifehacker, Lifehack and Smashing Magazine who frequently publish links to great content, and “How To” information.

My suggestion was to make Mahalo search results “diggable” – that doesn’t require content creation, just a short paragraph explaining why a particular link is worthy of a reader’s attention.

Mahalo has gone beyond that.. I am not sure that is the purpose of Mahalo, at least how it has been spun to us to date.

Should I be given any credit? Jason has done the “made for digg” content sites to death with Weblogs Inc, but he might not have realised that Mahalo needed something of the same to gain links.
If he did realise it, then in the podcast he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his future plans to publish diggbait.

But is it all just hot air?

Also vailable as Audio [MP3] video [mp4] iPod [mp4]

Staring

Jason Calacanis (here is a link to all my Jason Calacanis coverage)

Michael Gray also known as Graywolf
Brian Provost of Scoreboard Media
Allen Stern of CenterNetworks
… and some quiet blogger called Andy Beard who no one has really heard of but at least he gets everyone’s names spelled correctly ;)

Whilst throughout the podcast Graywolf was referred to as the wolf, and most of Jason Calacanis’ readers know he has been slacking a bit on his fatblogging, in some ways I can’t help thinking that at least in this episode, the real wolf was the one sitting in the chair.

I was my quiet, unassuming self especially at 1am on my “virgin” podcast, and on an international call it isn’t easy butting in on a conversation to make a point.

The domains by proxy discussion generally took over the discussion halfway through, and being a European (si3429 of 2006) I stayed out of it, and there was some great comparison of Squidoo and Mahalo.

Jason seems to think that all SEOs are out to game his service. I still think Mahalo is going to fall into a trap of always listing the same “trusted” sites such as Wikipedia, because for any term there might be 1000 credible links, and many of the SEO / Affiliate sites could easily have better information than even the original sources.

A good “white hat” , “thick” (rather than thin) Affiliate site is going to have potentially better information and links than Mahalo, and Mahalo scalability was looked at.

The last 5 minutes covers the greenhouse program and how people might attempt to game the Mahalo results.

With Mahalo having $250,000 reserved for Wikipedia donations this year from the $10 -$15 that editors can choose to give to Wikipedia instead of keeping for themselves, and the prominent position of Wikipedia links on every results page, I am sure Jason would really love those links being reciprocated (with a followable link to a fellow “trusted” Wiki).

You can probably make more money writing for PayPerPost than Mahalo, and have the chance to write better quality content.

Yes that is a referral link, and if you sign up for PayPerPost using that link, I will make as much as Jason pays for the “1 to 2″ hours he thinks it takes to write a good “Mahalo Search result”

You could also sign up for PayPerPost using the “Review My Post” button at the bottom of every one of my posts. All you then have to do is write a blog post, link through to my post in a short review, and we both make $7.50

If you love everything about Jason Calacanis, and want to rip apart everything I have said about Jason in the past in that review, you would still make $7.50

I suggested in the comments of my previous post on Mahalo that a researcher might spend a full working day in total on a search result.
For a partial search result with the Greenhouse program, I would hope for at least 4 hours of effort in evaluation and creation. If you have a search page with 20 links, surely it takes more than 3 to 6 minutes to find and evaluate each one for inclusion?
In Europe (well in the UK) that is $40 at minimum wage, but surely a good researcher is worth more than that?
Jason says he will evaluate the payments in the future, maybe he will introduce a tiered system where you can qualify for $40 to $100 per search result and bonuses over time for maintaining them.

Wikipedia is a non-profit, Mahalo is a business – outsourced workers don’t benefit from typical startup perks such as partial ownership, they deserve better compensation.

First of all a short video from SMX Seattle on various things regarding duplicate content and paid links. I am not sure if there is anything new, but it certainly emphasises how you should handle syndication of your content with links back to the original.

Delving back into my archives I have written fairly extensively about link attribution and links over time.
It had a few bumps but was never Dugg or stumbled, but still ranks first for terms like link attribution. Write quality timeless content from day one with your blog, you can always highlight it again at a later date when you have a larger audience, and at the same time reinforce it with new internal links with different keywords in the anchor text.

I should also note that I make sure I get links back to my original articles when they are syndicated on WebProNews (with permission), and with lots of links in feed items, I get links from sploggers daily too.
Thus whilst they are syndicating my content, those are some of the best links I get on a regular basis, because Google knows where it originated, and that it must be good content to also be syndicated on an authority site. Hmm they link to me, I link to them.

I should also note that I like their videos because they play so well on lower bandwidth connections (though mine should have finally been upgraded to something 20x faster over the weekend) – I am much more inclined to syndicate their content than anything on Youtube, Podtech etc, because I can watch it easily.

There is some good coverage at SEO Round Table, and I link to them because… well all kinds of reasons as listed before in my 32 Kinds of Blogging Payola and I am not ashamed to admit it.

Of note so far is the duplicate content summit, more with Matt Cutts, and the SEO Meets SMM/SMO session (though that was deliberately fairly basic)

Jason Calacanis Interview With Loïc Le Meur

This is actually very interesting and has some great tips halfway through about “how to game the hell out of bloggers who lie about everything such as Valleywag”.

That isn’t a specific quote, but Jason did make that abundantly clear. Jason actually comes across a lot more “reasonable” in this Podcast compared to his own, maybe because he was the one being questioned, and not asking the questions.

I do wish Loïc Le Meur had asked some tougher questions, but I gather from the interview that Jason put him up overnight before hand in the pool-house which used to be the Mahalo office for 3 months.

Loïc Le Meur is an investor or on the board of a lot of technology companies – I couldn’t find any direct financial connection but it certainly was a friendly conversation.

Credit where credit is due, I found out about this video on Bumpzee from a message by Bobosse.
You shouldn’t be worried about Bumpzee picking up your content snippets, because there is so much smart interlinking happening on Bumpzee, and so much link love being given back from all kinds of related pages that you honestly can’t lose.

Ah well… as the saying goes, start as you mean to go on!

1. Keyword Stuff Your Meta Keywords

Real cute 1990s SEO… on your home page

Stuff your meta keywords with terms unrelated to the content of the page

<meta name="keywords" content="Main Page,50 Cent,Air Conditioner,Al Gore,American Idol,Apple,Asthma,Beer,Bill Gates,Britney Spears,Cadillac Escalade" />

The words do often appear on the page, but it is hardly content. If Mahalo is a search engine, it should use keywords link “malhalo, search, search engine”

2. Suspicious Terms and Conditions

This might be something totally legitimate, but it certainly looks suspicious to me.

I ran the Terms and conditions of Mahalo through Copyscape. It seems they were written by the same lawyers as Etsy…

Copyscape Results for Etsy

They are even more similar to the terms of service for Odeo

Copyscape Returns for Odeo

Those are both New York based startups, so there is a good chance they are using the same legal team.

Mahalo is based in California as I believe Jason has been for some time (he did originate from New York), and though he could be using the same legal team, you would expect him to have someone draw up custom legal paperwork.

Damn That Is Only 2 Negative Points, Surely I can Find More?

Actually no, not really…

I could criticise it for just being just quickly edited scraped results from another search engine, but having spent a few hours digging around on the pages of lots of search results, I know for a fact that the researchers have really been doing some homework to come up with some of the results.

I could criticise it for the SEO, because the site is clearly intended to in the future rank highly in the search engines, but I couldn’t possibly because I make sites for that purpose daily.
I think I might be slightly better on internal site structure than Jason’s guys, after all, it isn’t that smart to stick nofollow on all the links on a page that is effectively your sitemap.

Mahalo Is Better Than Wikipedia (or will be)

• Mahalo is linking to sites without a Nofollow Tag
• When you search on Mahalo, you will still have to visit other sites if you are searching for information – Wikipedia takes other people’s ideas and research, rewrites it, and doesn’t even give a search engine followable link.
• Mahalo currently seems to have impartial editors – seriously I don’t think Jason and his views on a particular subject are taken into consideration at all. As an example you would think the advertorial page would be heavily weighted towards Jason’s point of view. The researcher has actually taken a lot of time and even included one of my pages that doesn’t rank for advertorial in Google.
• Mahalo has qualified researchers – these documents aren’t being written by students who think it is fun to impersonate university professors. They seem to be using real names, and you can search for them in Google and check their history.

I can see some of the search links being monetized in the future for products with the various engines, but a few I checked currently didn’t seem to be with affiliate links.

Overall – Actually I am impressed

A lot of the concerns website owners have with Wikipedia have been addressed. They are not attempting to write content, just provide relevant links.
It is early days yet, Wikipedia started out relatively harmless too, but I think a lot of the fundamentals are good, I am not worried about Mahalo taking up first position in the SERPS for information gathering.

Oh, but Mahalo will only have No2 for product search, because I definitely intend to have number one slot ahead of Jason.

It is alpha, I started off with a couple of teething problems in this first look, but overall it is looking very solid.

I wonder if Jason is staying with ThisNext, he will be competing against them for search results.

Yep, and here is a link to Mahalo – I don’t mind linking to them occasionally, even without a nofollow, unlike Wikipedia.

I first started to watch on Sunday morning, and as was typical with my connection, even at Podtech’s lowest quality setting, it was watch 10 seconds of video, wait 30 seconds for it to cache some more.
Then for some reason the stream connection broke and didn’t restart. The payer insisted that I start watching from the beginning again – no chance.

So I opted to download the full MP4 file – the only download version available seems to be the “full quality” version, 180MB – normally that isn’t a problem but it takes a while. For some reason the download was interrupted, and it didn’t resume.

I haven’t actually watched it all yet but some interesting notes:-

How did they manage to discuss so many of the topics I have been covering without mentioning my name once?
Even the change to Jason’s own disclosure came up, and it was referred to something like “you guys” that he had made a change.

This kind of video is great because you can watch the body language.

I tend to agree with the comments on Jason’s blog about references to “most people” this and that assumptions.

Jim Kukral had some good words to say about Ted’s marketing and cool head.

I got the feeling that this interview wasn’t Pay Per Post being put on the spot, but Jason Calacanis, or at least a bit of both.

So anyway Jason, as ThisNext is so honourable and above board, how many ThisNext users who use ThisNext with affiliate links include a disclosure at the start of the review, and does ThisNext require disclosure?

Update:- whilst this initially started off as quite a short post with very little commentary, do take the time to read the comments because they contain some intense debate regarding disclosure in paid posts, advertorials and affiliate marketing