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.

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

Seth Godin Speaks to Google

In this video Seth Godin is insightful, and explains to a bunch of Googlers all about Purple Cows and Flipping the Funnel on its side and embracing buzz marketing.

The concepts are sage advice, however there is one major pitfall.

If the perfect way to market a product is to flip the funnel on its side to become a megaphone, as Seth describes “The fashion permission complex”, then Google is in trouble, because they can’t currently charge for it, and they are constantly denouncing companies like PayPerPost who can make money from buzz marketing.
Google attacks PayPerPost mainly because PayPerPost potentially has the ability to disturb the link balance their algorithms place on the fabric of the internet.

The same is true for PR firms and almost all marketing, PayPerPost however in many cases is cheaper.

Matt Cutts thinks it is good value to do viral marketing, so you pay a specialist $5000 for a few hours work, and you might be lucky to get 100 links. It is not guaranteed.

With PayPerPost you pay $5000, and in general you will only get writers who have some genuine interest in your product writing about it, just like a PR firm isn’t going to persuade a blog on parenthood to write about the latest database system from Oracle. That might be a bad example, I actually know a few blogs that could do such a review justice, who occasionally talk about parenting as well.
PayPerPost delivers 200-300 people writing about your product, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but you are guaranteed the buzz.

The biggest problem? This presentation is from February 2006 – PayPerPost didn’t even exist when this presentation was made, and Google didn’t adapt and fill the void that Seth Godin spotted, because it doesn’t fit with Google’s primary source of revenue.

Thanks for posting the timely video Jack, I had seen it before, but things didn’t connect as well as they do now in hindsight.

Robert Scoble Reinvents PageRank?

Robert Scoble posted 3 videos yesterday along with a short blog post he hopes won’t be noticed on Techmeme, so of course it will ;)

Social Graph Based Search Parts 1, 2 and 3

I couldn’t work out a way to embed each individual video, so I embedded the full channel and provided links to individual parts.

What Robert is saying is that social networks help create a web of trust in the content people refer to, and thus that will eventually play a pivotal role in how searching for content will work in the future.

He didn’t reference Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, but those services also in some situations can provide better search results than Google.

Robert seems to be fixated by the idea that Mahalo provides a list of HDTV manufacturers on their search page, and Google doesn’t.

That fact is based upon SEO, and he seems to think the review sites and trusted vendors such as Amazon are bad results.

Robert blames this on SEOs, when in fact it is the fault quite often of the manufacturers having very hard to navigate, poorly optimized sites, that don’t attract natural linkage.

I think it is testament to Google’s algorithms that some review sites do appear above Amazon.

I disagree with Robert that the Mahalo results page is better, what is missing from the Google search is just a suggested search term “HDTV manufacturers” along with the other suggestions.
Most of the Maholo results were taken straight from the top of Google, and many of the remainder are shopping comparison sites and coupon sites = yes it is those dirty SEOs and affiliates at play again.

You still have to count how many clicks you have to perform until you get the information you are looking for, and for all but general browsing, Mahalo doesn’t offer any advantages.

There isn’t even a decent link to something explaining the difference between the various formats and technology, no links to specific self help forums etc.

The Mahalo page is so good that Yahoo doesn’t even pick up any links to it yet.

Networks of Contacts = PageRank

Networks of friends, contacts and who links to and trusts each other is effectively the same as PageRank, and that is proving to be broken and easy to manipulate.

One of the biggest problems is that “Robert Scoble” as an example might have a lot of credibility when talking about mobile phones, or camcorders, but using one of Robert’s examples a while back, he knows nothing about lawnmowers.

Techmeme overcome this by having separate indices for different topical authority, but that only works partially.
Techmeme certainly doesn’t pick up every important technology story, as an example I don’t think the SES discussion on paid links appeared on Techmeme.

Google Has It’s Failing

Google does have it’s failing, but currently Mahalo and various meme and social networks are only offering a subset of the data Google is dealing with, and Google is slowly making changes to the way it’s algorithms work.
Google does take into consideration topical authority to a certain extent – PageRank is only part of the equation, whereas that is effectively all Techmeme and Facebook could offer as an alternative to improve search.

One of the big reasons Facebook doesn’t open up is monetary, they wouldn’t be able to control search, and the income that can produce.

Rand has already responded, Duncan has already responded on Techcrunch, I am sure others will, and this is already on Techmeme.

Muhammad also has some interesting coverage, from a social network point of view, Google still has a number of its own services yet to be integrated.

David Utter on WebProNews also offers some insight into the TV factor – using Facebook takes some effort to get any kind of quality results.

It also seems that Techmeme seems to have developed some very selective results and doesn’t like me any more, or maybe I have to use specific titles for Techmeme to work correctly, something Robert in his video was suggesting isn’t the case.

Dave Winer has also rumbled and thinks Google is on the top rung and will be hard to shift.
Over a 4 year span I don’t think it would be impossible to take a chunk out of Google, as things are moving faster, but Facebook, Techmeme and certainly Mahalo are not the platforms that will do it.

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.

SEM Isn’t a Neglected Niche

PlugIM has been going reasonably well for quite a while
Bumpzee has lots of communities that are SEO / SEM / Marketing related

There are also a number of other marketing and blogging bookmarking and news sites that I have seen though didn’t seem to have quite as much traction.

Sure, SEO, SEM etc isn’t very popular on sites like Digg unless you have a very cultivated audience, and even then you have to have an insane amount of credibility in the the eyes of the general Digg population to stand a chance of not being buried.

So if it is not availability of suitable social networks for the topic maybe it is…

Sphinn is a Better Technology Platform?

Sphinn is running on Pligg

Well at least Sphinn is sometimes running on Pligg…

PlugIM is also running on Pligg, but from what I can see, other than cosmetic differences such as adding all your other social networks, and possibly “stalking” (I haven’t looked at that closely), the version of Pligg used by PlugIM is much more heavily customised.

This includes:-

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (though this isn’t collected from the content)

Categorization of content just doesn’t work – there is a big difference in SMO with the purpose of gaining links, and SMO with the aim to gather email or RSS subscribers for Direct Marketing.

Bumpzee on the other hand is a custom platform – it still has a few bugs, and quite a few features missing. If it received a similar amount of attention as Sphinn seems to be getting, I am sure the guys at Bumpzee would spend a huge amount more time on it rounding off the features.

Ultimately Bumpzee currently blows Pligg out of the water for features unless Pligg is heavily customised.

• Autosubmission of content
• Tagging (picked up automatically)
• Lots of Widgets
• Multiple interlinked communities

Sphinn has no technological advantage, in fact it might be looked on as inferior

Attention Wars

Lots of people in the SEM community have attacked Jason Calacanis for Mahalo his (in his own words) “viable Google co-exister”, and Guy Kawasaki for Truemors.

Danny Sullivan was one of the heavy detractors.

The only reason Sphinn might be successful is Danny Sullivan & Attention

Deja Vu anyone?

Hardly anyone in the SEM community would give a damn about Sphinn if it wasn’t launched by Danny. I have seen Pligg sites heavily criticised by many SEO/SEM specialists.

When Danny Sullivan announced Sphinn, he stated:-

By no means do we envision Sphinn as replacing general news sites like Digg. We just think the story submission model can work and be powerful in a specialized area such as search, as well.

By the way, we’re not the first to try this for search. In February 2006, The Search Engine Press was launched, then John Battelle kicked off SearchMob in September of that year. Since then, we’ve had others appear, including BUMPzee and ISEdb Scoop. We’re happy to join them!

That was actually only the second time Bumpzee had been mentioned on Search Engine Land.

I can only assume that Bumpzee wasn’t gaining exposure on influential SEO / SEM blogs because of some kind of disclosure problem, or not wanting to promote a future competitor, or a future competitor owned by a strategic business partner.

PlugIM has never been mentioned, though it does pick up Danny’s content from Search Engine Land.

At least Sphinn can’t be accused of copying some of the better features on PlugIM.

Critical Mass

Sphinn now exists, and will likely capture the attention of a large proportion of the SEM / SEO community, because ultimately most people involved in SEO / SEM in one way or another are attention and link whores.
Danny certainly has a fair amount of attention, and a lot of other people in the industry with attention are also promoting the site, at least a little.

It will continue to grow as long as Danny keeps driving traffic to it, but he is not even doing a very good job of that.
Guy Kawasaki leverages his own traffic to drive people to Truemors with an RSS feed above the fold on the front page.
Search Engine Land currently only has a link in the top right corner, and no voting buttons as standard.

I also noted that SEL has MyBlogLog removed. Does this mean they are going to try to make Sphinn more “social” with widgets as well?

Unfortunately Sphinn is a very category centric niche voting site – I don’t see it’s population growing beyond the aggregate subscriber base of Search Engine Land and SEOmoz.

Market Segmentation

With Sphinn, the guys from Search Engine Land are effectively claiming their own little kingdom in social news, unfortunately whilst it might be good for Danny to enhance his own attention, and maybe drive traffic to a number of sites that deserve some limelight (I have noticed Meg, Lyndon & Maki doing well), I am not sure this is such an ideal situation.

There are various groups of people involved in SEO / SEM who don’t even acknowledge that the others exist. The same is true of internet marketing and affiliate marketing.

Building Bridges

What was really needed was for existing services to be given some attention, which would have the effect of building bridges between communities.
A service promoted significantly by the SEO / SEM and affiliate / internet marketing community could gain critical mass for a news network that allowed content that was more commercially flavoured, and such a community would also attract casual users, linkerati, press and ultimately drive more traffic to good content.

The best option possible would have been to adopt something that already existed.

Not the Same As Blog Social Networks

In my opinion this is not the same as blog social networks, within which Bumpzee also fall, competing against Mybloglog and Blogcatalog.
In theory there are 75M bloggers, and I doubt there are many more than 200K actively interested in SEO / SEM enough to be involved with a social news site on the topics. It is only when you start merging with internet marketing, affiliate marketing and “make money online” that you start hitting the 1M+ audience that is easily possible.

Spinn Exists – Have to Use It

I am already giving Spinn as much promotion as Danny is himself, with a voting link on every page. I want the attention, but hopefully I can also divert some of that attention towards other services that are equally deserving.

The Alexa data is more for future reference as Sphinn has just plummeted after its launch and will take a while to gain traction.

Including 4 voting buttons on a page is dividing attention, although I have removed StumbleUpon because providing a button was reducing any “thumbs up” I might receive.
Ultimately, if I was to remove one of the 4, it would currently be Sphinn.

Giving Attention

It is honestly a shame that Danny and Search Engine Land took this direction. It would have been much better to promote the existing services extensively 4 months ago. By this time they would be booming, and drawing a much wider audience – such strategies have much stronger long term effects.

Of course it is not just Danny – Rand for instance didn’t even mention competing services in his post, and the first mention of the fact that it was running on Pligg rather than “the site itself has some fairly exceptional functionality” was by Carsten in the comments

When you share your audience with others, quite often you get it back in spades. Two posts in a row touching on reciprocity.

I would honestly much rather be bumping or plugging everyone’s posts than using Sphinn, because that would suggest growing cohesion within the industry, and not more splintering.

With that said, everyone interested in SEO and SEM should sign up with Sphinn, and also grab Michelle’s Sphinn plugin

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.