I think that SEOs have such a small amount of actual advice that they never say anything in these panels/clinics because if they did you wouldn’t need to hire them. I’ve seen a half dozen SEO-related panels over the year and it’s always the same thing… like some infomercial where they will tell you their five secrets… IF you give them $199.95.

Well, them’s more fightin’ words. Michael Gray, also known as GrayWolf, decided to give the SEO treatment to Mahalo, free of charge. Gray found numerous SEO mistakes in his detailed and lengthy report (which becomes a great tutorial, too).

The fun part of Gray’s post is where he calls out code that shows an interest in being ranked in the search results:

It’s kinda hard to make the claim that you aren’t interested in SEO when this is a comment on your page <!– Main Content for serps ***********************–>

Gray concludes with this explanation:

Why did I spend the time writing this? I know you’re a smart guy, and just because you happen to have run into some sleazy SEO’s in the past doesn’t mean we are all bad. We’re no different than any other profession, there are good people and bad people, but it’s unfair to critcize an entire industry just because of a few bad apples. I also would like to think that you’re a big enough person to realize when you’ve made a mistake, and aren’t afraid to admit it.

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?

Calacanis has become something of a lightning rod with his opinions on SEO. He even managed to provoke this reaction from Danny Sullivan back in August:

Want to be like Robert — and Jason Calacanis — and keep equating SEO with spam? Then fuck off.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the F-word in any of my writing, and my apologies for being so crass. But I’ve had enough of people trying to advance their own personal agendas (Jason hoping someone will care about Mahalo; Robert hoping someone will watch his videos) on the back of an industry that is full of plenty of people who do good work.

Krasilovsky justified the invitation in his comment response on the Sphinn story, saying, “if Jason can invite his harshest critics to debate him on his own blog — and they all seemed to have come and participated — why can’t we invite Jason to speak to our audience?”

But no one is telling Krasilovsky what he can and can’t do; as far as we know he can invite whatever personal pals he likes to chat. Calacanis should be something of a draw in the way Rush Limbaugh is today to people who don’t share his views.

If that gets a few more people to attend, that works out well for the Kelsey Group. Conferences are a business first, and stirring up interest ahead of the conference by inviting Calacanis looks like a good decision right now.

Not surprisingly, this has sparked a series of posts, including one from Randy Holloway entitled (you had to know this was coming) “Why Dave Winer sucks.” Stowe Boyd took issue with Dave’s comments — in what I thought was a fairly reasonable manner — only to have Dave post via twitter (I refuse to say he “tweeted” or whatever I’m supposed to say) that Stowe was “a creep” and “an idiot.”

As usual, Dave has managed to turn something that could have been a worthwhile discussion about concepts and ideas into something personal. Why? Who knows. It’s just something he does. Not that long ago, he did it with Jason Calacanis, and he has done it with numerous others. It reminds me of the old story about the scorpion convincing the frog to carry him across the pond, and then stinging him at the last minute, causing them both to drown. And when the frog asks why, the scorpion says: “I couldn’t help it — it’s my nature.”

Steve is right to use a pic of kids playing in a sandbox to illustrate his post about the whole affair. As for Dave’s complaints, it’s all well and good to talk about Facebook as a roach motel or a closed system or the new AOL or whatever (something I’ve expressed doubts about in the past), but as Brandon and Stowe himself have pointed out, address book data isn’t trapped as Dave makes it out to be, thanks to Facebook’s API. Nice try, Dave.

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Facebook Bubble Cult Pushes Value To $100 Billion

Well, Jason Calacanis calls it "full-blown madness," but I like the drama of cultish mass delirium better – it brings up imagery of frothy mouths, rolled back eyes, and bacon-frying twitchiness.

Reporting from the Graphing Social Patterns conference, for developers and marketers looking to better utilize the Facebook open platform, Calacanis says a panel of fans and investors valued Facebook at $100 billion and predicted the annihilation of Google and MySpace at the hands of Mark Zuckerberg.

And some of us thought $8 billion and $15 billion were steep valuations. Under the same math, Calacanis says that makes Google worth about $14 trillion. Is there even that much money in the world?

There were other claims made, but these are enough to make you dizzy, or go mad. "[T]his is the kind of madness that got us in trouble the last time around (i.e. 1999)," says Calacanis.

If you believe all that, I’ve got a novel I haven’t finished writing yet that’s guaranteed to sell 3 billion copies – yes, half the world will read it and I’ll never have to work again.

If Facebook, with half the traffic and a third of the pageviews of rival MySpace, has reached such heights by opening up its platform to developers, what happens when MySpace does the same?

Or maybe, if Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was erroneous in his "faddish" assessment of Facebook, then Rupert Murdoch must be stupid? News flash: Murdoch has proved, whether you like him or not, that he is the best at playing this game.

And as for the annihilation of Google…well, we’ve heard that before from more than a few much larger and more successful online properties than Facebook.

For charts and graphs and more madness, check out Calacanis’s lengthy post.

Alice: “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

You have to hand it to Jason Calacanis, the diminutive Web entrepreneur behind Mahalo, for completely ignoring all the ink and electrons that have been spilled writing about the concept of Web 3.0 — including conversations like the one I had with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web — and just coming up with his own definition. Not only that, he has the audacity to call it the “official” definition. Official according to whom? Why, to Jason, of course.

Not surprisingly, as Fred Wilson points out in his post, Jason’s definition is also effectively a thumbnail description of Mahalo, the people-powered search/directory service he is trying to build. Web 3.0, he says, is:

“the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.”

That’s funny, because every time I’ve heard anyone who actually knows anything describe it, they use terms like “semantic Web,” and talk about adapting the way the Web is built so that information can be aggregated and linked in different ways automatically, as Josh Kopelman describes here. But that kind of definition wouldn’t suit Jason’s purposes, so in effect it doesn’t exist. I think I like the definition Jemima Kiss came up with better.

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Google Squishing Squidoo Over Spam

Marketing expert Seth Godin created Squidoo as a site where anyone could easily create a ‘lens’, which would be a user-created page that takes a deeper look into someone’s favorite subject.

As with all good things on the Internet, abusers came along to try and game the system. Jason Calacanis posted a spam he received, with links going back to Squidoo pages, as an example.

Calacanis also mentioned in a separate post how some SEO folks he chatted with on his podcast adored Squidoo for its ability to “game the system.”

“If SEOs love your platform you have a HUGE problem,” he said.

Google has evidently noticed the issues with Squidoo. As a result, plenty of Squidoo pages have been knocked back in the search results since July 7. Squidoo announced anti-spam changes to the service on July 5, but it appears that was too late to stop Google from penalizing Squidoo’s offending pages.

Blogger Ed Dale suggested a trio of reasons why Google may be placing Squidoo sites lower in its rankings. Dale doesn’t mention spam at all, or low quality pages, as possibly being a reason for the changes.

Google tends to be straightforward in its anti-spam efforts. If Matt Cutts or others who do Google’s spam fighting catch pages that violate Google’s guidelines, the hammer gets dropped. That looks like the case with Squidoo.

While there’s no doubt that Calacanis is a smart guy and has all the connections needed to get the backing for a Google challenger, I just don’t see why he would take on such a tremendously futile project.

While you can point out that no one expected Google to become so powerful, when it launched, the search industry is littered with companies that launched with a fanfare, before being crushed by the Google juggernaut.

Anyway, if nothing else, Valleywag’s “informed speculation” is worth a quick look, but if you’re short on time, here’s the gist of it…

So what’s the idea? It’s a cross between Wikipedia and Google. Calacanis’ new site will create more digestible search results for popular queries such as the names of Hollywood stars, and tech products. The pages will be seeded, initially, with content gathered automatically from the web and other sources. But they will be open to contributions by readers. Sounds like Wikipedia? Yes: except Calacanis will employ paid editors to oversee the pages.

Actually, it sounds more like a cross between Ask.com and Citizendium – the former is content to be #4 in market share, and the latter hasn’t exactly set the world on fire since its launch.

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As our Joe Lewis noted earlier about Wikipedia’s potential for marketing purposes, even the savviest pros can run afoul of the site’s numerous editors. Barry Schwartz of SERoundtable narrowly missed having his entry banned by the site.

The obvious appeal of Wikipedia comes from the Google SERPs for topics listed at the site. Wikipedia listings tend to appear above the fold in the search results, and marketers of all stripes would love to find a way to tap that sweet high PR link love themselves.

Before tugging on the boots and sauntering off in Wikipedia’s direction, keep in mind some of the advice handed out at SES New York today during the Wikipedia & SEO session, with Danny Sullivan presiding.

Neil Patel, Advantage Consulting Services co-founder who is known to our readers for his SEO challenge to Jason Calacanis, offered some straightforward "don’ts" to would-be Wikipedians:

• Don’t delete accurate information
• Don’t add biased information
• Don’t spam
• Don’t break the rules

Wikipedia is not a links dumpster. Treat it that way and prepare for a swift banning. Instead, Patel said to add information first, then links later. And, since people can add images, Wikipedia can be a great place to build a brand with those.

Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, JE Hochman & Associates, reminded everyone about the nature of outbound links from Wikipedia; they have the ‘nofollow’ attribute added to them. Wikipedia’s place in the SERPs has been built from inbound links, and that’s why creating an informative entry is so important.

He warned about the potential conflicts of interest that can happen when making Wikipedia entries. They should not shut anyone out from participating, so long as they are willing to learn Wikipedia’s policies and customs.

Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central, said Wikipedia benefited his network greatly, and has become a relevant traffic driver to their web properties. They would have to spend around $20k per month for the traffic they get from Wikipedia.

The cable channel has notability, which is a point that Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, made about Wikipedia entries. Those have to have notability, and he had a couple of tips about enhancing that:

• Use Google News archive search to find reference articles, but keep in mind an article with just a passing quote won’t be enough
• Don’t use PR firms to try and game the system

It’s all about respecting Wikipedia and playing by the rules.

Just to give everyone a better understanding of how I calculated the 21% increase, I first took the 6 days before SEO was done and compared it to 6 other days roughly 20 days after SEO was implemented. The data before SEO was done was a bit biased because on one of the days his traffic doubled because he wrote on the Oscars and the following day his traffic returned to normal. On that Monday, if he had normal traffic and did not blog on the Oscars his search traffic due to SEO would have increased by over 40%.

For those of you who are wondering what changes have been made so far, they are related to the title tag and meta descriptions of post pages.

Post titles where: The Jason Calacanis Weblog – [Name of post entry]

New Post titles: [Name of post entry]

Meta description tags before were blank and contained nothing.

New meta description: [First 20 or so words from the post]

These overall changes cause a few things from my understanding:

1. It helps the content look more unique in the eyes of a search engine.
2. Search engines place more weight on the words near the start of the page title so by moving the important words towards the beginning it helps with rankings.
3. It also helps make listings look more relevant in the search results and thus get a greater share of the clicks.

And as promised here is some education on SEO (some contrary to "popular" belief):

1. There are multiple factors that can cause a site to increase search traffic such as links, but on-page optimization is also a key component.
2. SEO is NOT a short term strategy, it can take months if not years. Buying traffic through PPC is a quick way to increase your traffic, SEO is long term.
3. Higher rankings on search engines can build trust and increase reputation. Getting a few extra hundred visitors a day to your website that may have not seen your blog before helps with branding.
4. SEO is not a quick fix or a quick way to get traffic. Getting on the homepage of Netscape is a quick way to increase your traffic.
5. SEOs can optimize garbage and in many cases increase a sites ranking, but where it is really effective is when you optimize a website that is filled with quality content and information. So if you spent that ten to twenty grand somewhere else you may get a big boost in traffic but ideally you would want to spend money on original research, video, audio, photos, services, etc… as well as on SEO.
6. In many cases sites rank for terms that they shouldn’t rank as high for such as "HDMI cables" but sooner or later search engines will keep on improving and more relevant results will be placed at the top of search engines.

Granted there could have been other things that caused an increase in your search traffic such as more links, but due to all of this I am confident that there was a good increase in search traffic from SEO. This is not a quick fix but instead a healthy way to organically improve search traffic. Either way I will still keep up my end of the deal.

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