Special guests: Andy Beard, Michael Grey, Brian Provost, and Allen Stern.

 

Hello everyone, Tyler here -- back again with another exciting episode for your viewing and listening pleasure.

 

In this episode, Jason gets feedback on Mahalo from four formidable figures in the SEO industry; an industry that Mahalo aims to make irrelevant. Is reasoned debate possible in a roundtable with such polarized participants? Watch or listen to CalacanisCast29 Beta to find out.

 

*Joining the Cast crew is Conrad Quilty-Harper, who you may recognize from his quality work at engadget.com

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Jason: Okay, welcome everybody to another issue/episode of CalacanisCast number…

 

Tyler: 29

 

Jason: 29, thank you Tyler. Tyler and I are back from a very successful trip to London.

 

Tyler: Jolly Old England.

 

Jason: Jolly Old England for seventy-two hours. We had back-to-back meetings, we had the NMK forum that Mike Butcher set up. What a guy. Treated us so well. Very good group of people. We launched the Mahalo Green House. Great response. Did a bunch of TV including Al Jazeera - which was interesting.

 

Tyler: Very Interesting.

 

Jason: Gotten a lot of feedback on that. Some folks are saying like, how could you be on Al Jazeera, aren’t they Al Qaeda. It’s interesting people assume that.

 

Tyler: Well on this side of the Atlantic there’s…

 

Jason: Right and over there it’s staffed by a bunch of BBC reports that actually don’t feel the same about it they just think it’s like CNN of the Middle East. So very interesting. But anyway, today is gonna be, I think, probably the best show in the history of CalacanisCast.

 

I basically, there’s a couple of guys on the web who, you know I mix it up with sometimes, from time to time. But, they’re actually intelligent guys and you know sometimes intelligent people can disagree about things, often they do. So I thought I would have these four guys on the show. People are gonna be kind of shocked that I invited them on the show, but actually they’ve been giving Mahalo a lot of attention and a lot of critical feedback, but also I think some fair criticism and some intelligent things so I’m very happy they came on the show and I hope we can have a very positive discussion even thought I’ve probably said some crazy things that you think would preclude there from being a positive discussion, but I think this will actually be a positive discussion.

 

So, let my go through the group, I’ll just interview each person, I’ll just introduce each person. Brian Provost is from Scoreboard Media Group and their domain name is http://www.scoreboard-media.com/ . How are you doing Brian?

 

Brian Provost: Doing well, how you doing?

 

Jason: Now Brian, you and I have mixed it up numerous times on the Blogs right?

 

Brian Provost: We have.

 

Jason: Right I remember a seminal Blog post: I think it was “Jason Calacanis charlatan douche bag” was one of your better ones.

 

Brian Provost: My favorite.

 

Jason: Probably up there and then also you I think said you were gonna knock me out at one point right? Was that correct.

 

Brian Provost: I said I was going to send someone a check if they knocked you out.

 

Jason: Oh you did. Yes. You were gonna pay somebody to knock me out, but you took that off the site. So we got past physical violence and we got it just down to talking about product basically…

 

Jason: And we also have Michael Gray from Gray-Wolf’s SEO Blog [Wolf-Howl.com], Michael you there?

 

Michael Gray: I am. Thank you for having me.

 

Jason: Michael of course is from Gray Wolf’s SEO Blog, he is, I guess, you’re one of the top SEO’s in the world right?

 

Michael Gray: I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I’m pretty well known.

 

Jason: Pretty well known and of course author of the seminal Blog post “Don’t Trust Jason Calacanis.”

 

Michael Gray: Yep.

 

Jason: Which was a great one that we all liked and got a lot out of. Also, I mean many other posts slamming Jason Calacanis in the history of the blog correct?

 

Michael Gray: That is correct.

 

Jason: Okay, so welcome to the program.

 

Jason: Allen Stern from Center Networks. Now, let’s see. Allen and I have been trading emails and he’s actually a pretty smart guy and he’s got a very well designed looking site and I’m trying to think... Very critical review of Mahalo... I can’t remember the name of the blog post, but yeah I mean basically went into sustainability of Mahalo and comparing us to About_Us and was giving me a hard time about my Fat Blogging actually today on my Blog. Allen welcome to the program!

 

Allen Stern: Thank you very much and one side note, we’re actually from the same place.

 

Jason: We’re both from Brooklyn?

 

Allen Stern: Yep.

 

Jason: Where in Brooklyn you from?

 

Allen Stern: Marine Park.

 

Jason: Oh, really, where abouts in Marine Park?

 

Allen Stern: …

 

Jason: …

 

Allen Stern: Oh yeah.

 

Jason: You know that area well.

 

Jason: And finally, Andy Beard from AndyBeard.eu . Now, where are you based Andy?

 

A.B: I’m actually based out in Poland.

 

Jason: You’re based out of Poland, so a very international show today. Andy you’ve written some great ones like “Calacanis’ Mahalo - how to build a biased self-propaganda machine” a classic, classic post in the seminal history of Mahalo. And yeah, stuffing meta keywords, suspicious terms and conditions I mean you took it apart pretty deftly I think.

 

A.B: That was probably my most favorable post for you?

 

Jason: It actually was one of your nicer ones actually cause at some point you said that you actually liked it. Let me see if I can find that here. You said overall actually I’m impressed so that was actually kind of interesting I mean of course you started with like 12 kicks but…

 

Jason: okay so guys, I don’t even know where to start this. We’ve got so much great history together. So many great blog posts back and forth. Maybe I could start by just asking you guys to you know…

 

Jason: I don’t know let me see, maybe Michael with Gray-Wolf since we’ve really gotten into it many times, what’s your first impression of Mahalo, what do you think about the site. What impact do you think it might have on search engine optimization if it was successful which I think the four of you will agree it has no chance of being successful?

 

Michael Gray: I personally am not a big fan of Mahalo. I think it actually allows you to fulfill your dream of being a closeted SEO even though you never want to like come out and say Hey I’m an SEO. I think that’s really what it is.

 

Jason: Really? So how so? Explain.

 

Michael Gray: There’s different parts of SEO, there’s some people who are concerned basically with the technically side making sure things are all in line and things like that and then there’s a second part which leans more towards the marketing side which is going after the high volume keywords of the high-dollar key words and looks to me that a lot of what you’re going after on Mahalo are both ends of those. You’re going after the words that are going to get a lot of searches a lot of people coming and visiting you and you’re going after some of the terms that are going to eventually turn into higher dollar terms.

 

Jason: Right, actually we’re starting with… actually that’s a great, great observation. We’re starting with in fact the terms that we think are the ones that are the most polluted on like say Google or Yahoo - so health terms or product terms. You know something like Viagra or even mortgages or travel where you have a lot of spam. You guys would agree there’s a lot of spam on those terms? Some of the most fought after.

 

Michael Gray: Here’s the thing, if you look at ‘buy Viagra’.

 

Jason: Uhuh?

 

Michael Gray: Despite the fact that all of those sites happen to be .edu sites when things work you actually do end up at a sight that lets you buy Viagra. So, we may not like that it’s all there like that, we may not like that Google favors all those edu sites, but you’re actually getting what you want.

 

Jason: So I guess the justification of SEO’s is that if you, are you saying the justification is if at the end of the day you get to something that is related to Viagra the customer is happy but what about the content like if they were looking for information about Viagra all of the high quality links and information that doesn’t make it up to there.

 

Michael Gray: Well, if you look at the ‘Viagra’ page and the ‘buy Viagra’ page you kinda get different results to a certain extent. The Viagra page is probably a little cleaner than buy Viagra although ‘buy Viagra’ is one of those pages that’s held up as one of those litmus test to like look at how spammy this is.

 

Jason: Right. So you know when you compare like say our travel sites and something like that with a Google one and we’re doing the process of try-to-be-neutral and pick only the best links that are the most helpful to people where we can verify who owns the site that they have a phone number, etc, you know that they’ve been around for a while. What do you think, if successful, the impact that would have on search engine optimization? And we all agree - the four of you I’m sure agree - that Mahalo will be absolutely be a terrible failure, but if you can imagine Gray Wolf for a moment here. Should I call you Gray Wolf or should I call you Mike?

 

Michael Gray: Either one is fine.

 

Jason: I’m gonna call you Gray Wolf cause it’s just so cool and I guess Gray Wolf is because you’re somewhere between a black hat and a white hat is that the idea?

 

Michael Gray: It’s actually a last name and when I was a kid I attached to the Wolf animal so it just kinda stuck.

 

Jason: Okay, so, Mr. Gray Wolf. If Mahalo, in some ultimate universe, ever could become successful, what impact would it have on your business if you had to get through a human in order to be ranked?

 

Michael Gray: I want to ask you a question about travel first. How do you feel about affiliate site links in your engine? Do you think they’re generally good? Generally bad? Or you know it’s hard to make a blanket statement some affiliate sites are good, some are bad?

 

Jason: I think probably the majority are bad or what I would say is the majority are not as good as the high quality sites that come above them so if you look at people who spend a lot of money on content like Lonely Planet, Trip Advisor, Travel & Leisure you know New York Times, Foder’s, Frommer’s they don’t even rank in the top 30 or 40 if you type in Paris Hotels, but you do have tons of affiliates so I think if I was a user typing in Paris Hotels I’d much rather go to Foder’s, Frommers, Travel & Leisure and the high quality content sites or directly to the hotels themselves than the affiliates and I think that most people would agree with that, what do you think Gray Wolf?

 

Michael Gray: Well I’m looking at some of your travel stuff and I noticed for all the destinations you actually re-directed everything so it’s destination vacation. I happen to be a big Disney fan so one of the things that I happened to type in just to look at you was Disney World and you automatically re-directed me to Disney World Vacations and that kind of goes back to my earlier point where your Disney World Vacations is a much more monetizable kind of term.

 

Jason: So back to the issue though like what impact do you think it would have on your business if you had to get through a human filter to be successful

 

Michael Gray: I think it’d be easy to get through you just got to know what people are looking at, actually people are easier to fool than machines in a certain respect.

 

Jason: Right so you think you could actually fool the Mahalo Guides?

 

Michael Gray: Well I’ve actually seen on your Mahalo guides page for Walt Disney World vacations I could tell you there are affiliate sights listed in there. In the main section in the top 7 section, in the, yep…

 

Jason: Which one?

 

Michael Gray: Well I’m not gonna tell you.

 

Jason: Oh you’re not gonna tell me. But on the Disney one you think there’s an affiliate one huh?

 

Michael Gray: There’s more than one I can tell you there’s more than one.

 

Jason: Really, interested so maybe the SEOs have already gotten in there or we’ve gotten our results from Google trying to find them and we got duped.

 

Michael Gray: Not that those sites are necessarily bad, I would say that most of them are pretty good as far as the information, but a lot of them a littered with affiliate links. And some of the other things that I think are weird when you give the little Mahalo sign for some of the results like a “guide recommended” result.

 

Jason: Yeah.

 

Michael Gray: There’s actually one there that has the little Mahalo sign and then it has the triangle which means it’s a warning so it’s kind of weird that you recommend this site, but now it’s a warning.

 

Jason: Well the warning might be like it’s ad heavy, so we recommend the site but we’re upset that it has too many ads on it, that’s why we use that symbol. So what do you, I mean, do you think that the results that we’re producing head-to-head with Google are better?

 

Michael Gray: I’d say you’re about the same. You’re not giving me anything tremendously different than they are.

 

Jason: Less spam?

 

Michael Gray: I don’t necessarily think so.

 

Jason: Okay, alright interesting, okay. Let me go over to Brian from Scoreboard Media Group. Brian when you first saw Mahalo what did you think?

 

Brian Provost: You know I was hoping for the best. I really was. You know - I understand the problem. I think it’s valid to think that humans can do it better. I’m just not so sure by the nature of the web that this is a human process anymore and even when you do put humans in place, a search engine really controls so very little of the entire process. There might be sites that you put in Mahalo where guys like me and Mike end up buying one of the landing sites, one of the recipient sites, we worked with traffic traders or one of those guys. And that’s exactly what’s gonna happen if you ever build an audience to this thing.

 

Jason: You think you’re gonna be able to sneak links in?

 

Brian Provost: Now say there’s a link to some hobby site whose an authority on a particular topic. Unless you’re checking and clicking through everything in Mahalo all the time you’re never gone know who really owns that site and quite a bit of that happened in the early days of very large directory systems and to a certain extent, this is what Mahalo is.

 

Jason: Right, but you know we’re hiring full time people here who believe in the mission who want to help people and not list spam and that kind of stuff so this is a little different from an open directory project and even the people who are in the greenhouse you know they write the results, we know who they are, we have there names and you know they’ve signed a terms-of-service with us and we check there work before it goes in so a little bit harder to game the system I think, but you do make a fair point, unless we’re checking these things somebody could redirect the traffic to somewhere else is your point?

 

Brian Provost: Or if, it might look legit for awhile and then a year later Mike and I go cut those guys a check one of the people listed in there.

 

Jason: Right so that would be a great way for you guys to sort of dupe us is to get in there and so basically it’d be a two-step project. You’d see who we picked already, pay them off and it’s like if we had traffic. If all the sudden Mahalo was the number one search engine you’d go to those people and say I’ll buy your site or I’ll buy your traffic from you.

 

Brian Provost: Exactly.

 

Jason: That’s brilliant.

 

Brian Provost: You know I went in there this afternoon after I got the message from your assistant and first stage I go to the front page and I see Dodge Viper. I own a Dodge Viper so I went to check the results. The problem is they’re decent results, but they’re not authority results. I look at this page and there are 20 other sites that deserve to be there instead, so how do you scale out the problem of finding actually authorities and experts for all the topics.

 

Jason: I think it’s a great questions, Brian, and I think the way we do that is one the public can submit links - right? And they are if you look at like iPhone or apple people are submitting links and we’re banning them or excepting them or leaving them in that box there and they all have no follow up cause I know you guys love that and you know we let the public tell us what we missed and then if a person has written a hundred car SERPs, search and result pages as you guys know, they get pretty good at it. They figure out who all the authoritative sites are. So we may not get the most obscure things, but we’re launching these search results 60-70 percent complete and we’re hoping the public will help us get them to the 100 percent complete over the next 2-3 years.

 

Brian Provost: Okay. So let’s assume that the process becomes robust and you can scale it and I don’t doubt that you’ve got a really good team there that can do that and grow with you. I think another problem is you’re swimming a bit against the current here in the sense that these searchers, the average searcher, is a lot more intelligent than they were 3-4 years ago so you’re seeing more what are called long-tail searches, but are basically what are targeted 3-5 words searches. You guys may not be able to participate in due to your format, but will actually deliver the best search experience that somebody would find…

 

Jason: Right so somebody types in dodge Viper accessories, or Dodge Viper head lamps or something.

 

Brian Provost: It’s really hard to guess cause people really do search on some pretty stupid stuff.

 

Jason: Do you think people search that often because they’re a little frustrated with the amount of spam in search results today and you know they do two, three, four searches cause they’re not finding what they’re looking for, that’s sort of what I’ve learn in a little user-testing.

 

Brian Provost: I think there’s some of that, I think that people are just information hungry and they’re smart enough now to understand that they’re gonna find their answer through maybe five different searches instead of looking up something as simple as Dodge Viper.

 

Jason: Yeah, yeah… I have a Corvette by the way.

 

Brian Provost: How did I know that?

 

Jason: Dodge Viper and Corvette two great cars actually, what year’s your Viper?

 

Brian Provost: 2001.

 

Jason: Oh 2001. They’re coming out with a 600 horsepower one next year right?

 

Brian Provost: Yeah I’m on a list, I’m supposed to get it at the end of the year.

 

Jason: Wow, that’s a nice car man. They’re coming out with the blue devil for the Corvette as well six hundred horsepower or something.

 

Brian Provost: It’s second golden era horsepower.

 

Jason: Alright Brian, that’s good feedback.

 

Jason: Allen Stern Center Networks. Your there? Still Here?

 

Allen Stern:: I am here.

 

Jason: Okay cool. So you had some criticism of Mahalo. I think we sort of debated those already. Maybe not so interesting, but we’re back two weeks into it. We’re adding five hundred search terms a week we’ve opened the Greenhouse. Have you opened the product? Have you compared the search results to Google or Yahoo? What’s your impression?

 

Allen Stern: Let me just first say, I know what you’ve said a couple of times now was that we all think that your sites gonna be a failure or we want it to be a failure. I don’t know if it’ll be a failure, I don’t know if it’ll be a success, but your name attached to it is giving you more buzz than say 99% of the other start-ups out there, which is dead if they were doing it. About us for example, and when About_Us started they got a little bit of press for a couple of days and then basically have ridden off into the sunset.

 

Allen Stern: You guys are continuing to get press because your name is behind it so I think if it’s a success some of that is going to come naturally from your popularity online. You have a huge fan base obviously and that’s gonna play into it. When I look at your product, the issue I have with your product is not so much from a search engine because Center Networks is really not a search engine website like the other people you have on the call but really more about buy-in. And about the fact that how are you determining whose pages you make.

 

Jason: Right

 

Allen Stern: How are you determining what links get on a page?

 

Jason: Exactly.

 

Allen Stern: If I break those up into two separate examples. How do you determine who gets a page. You’ve created a page for yourself, are you one of the top ten thousand search engine terms? No! Is CK Sample one of them? No! Is Amanda Congdon one? Is Mike Arrington one? Is EnGadget one? No! But these are your friends, so clearly the way I look at it is you created a site initially to make sure your friends got as much publicity as possible.

 

Jason: That’s an interesting, interesting way to read into it. I appreciate that and I appreciate you keeping us honest. Big debate we had internally after reading your Blog Post. We actually took down the CK Sample page and I agree with you, he shouldn’t have been in there and I’ll give you the back-story on it. When we were doing profiles he did his own just to show people what he thought it should look like. Now in terms of doing the dot com people, the Mike Arrington’s of the world and what not, we actually did once for all the top bloggers, all the top podcasters cause my thinking was and this is honest Allen, I didn’t just do my friends I did Nick Denton and people I don’t get along with as well. I just thought one great way to show the power of this, especially at lunch, and it was pre-meditated, it was totally my idea was lets do the people who have blogs, lets do the people who have podcasts, lets do journalists and lets do dot com companies, Kevin Rose who obviously I’ve had some friction with and stuff like that so we actually did all those people and we tried to do them really fair. I think they called us out about the sites as well and you know we have Gizmodo on tons of pages and the people who work here at Mahalo with the exception of CK don’t even know what sites I worked on really at Weblogs Inc. It’s a totally new group of people so they’re not going to put EnGadget over Gizmodo, AutoBlog over… ‘cuz they don’t even know who did which and to a certain extent…

 

Allen Stern: I’m sorry, wouldn’t they know that if they went to the Jason Calacanis page on Mahalo?

 

Jason: Yeah they might. They might. I don’t think there’s any grand conspiracy there. If you look you’ll see Gizmodo linked to as much as EnGadget.

 

Allen Stern: Sure, I guess my concern is that over time what’s gonna happen is, you have guides that potentially could favor one site over another and I just used one example, but it could be any of the websites.

 

Jason: Bias is a big issue. I think you nailed in on that and so just to give you a little insight, we have people who are working here, we’ve taken a lot out of the Wikipedia’s sort of neutral point of view and we say hey lets pick what sites are best. Nobody here is allowed to right a search result on something they have a vested interest in, so if your mom owns a website about wedding dresses you’re not allowed to work in the weddings group and you have to disclose that and all that sort of stuff. We’re basically fighting bias here, we’re building the rules just as they did at EnGadget or at publications before that so sort of brought the Journalistic standards of church & state to building these search pages. My hope is by having those standards and I would fire anybody who did something biased and I mean that sincerely. We can fight that. But you’re right. Bias is an issue and I think it’s a very astute one for you to point out.

 

Allen Stern: Yeah I think that as you start to scale out and hire more and more employees it could potentially become more and more of a problem. I know we’ve exchanged a couple of emails about the fact that whether my site will appear on any of the pages and I think one of the things I go back to is something you said a few minutes ago is that you guys are looking at Google for them pulling the results that are going to appear on Mahalo or at least to some extent. So I guess my question to you would be, how are you determining what’s in say the top seven of the Dodge Viper pages? Are you using Google results? If you’re using Google results than how are you any better except the fact that you’re sifting. All you’re doing is sifting Google results so you are….

 

Jason: Great, Great question Allen. I would say Google is probably ten percent of the process. We also use things like delicious, Technorati, Ask, Yahoo, Flicker, all the different search engines and tagging systems out there. Also after you’ve done a hundred car results and you visited all those sites, you start to know which ones have better quality or not. In the travel example, Lonely Planet might be great guidebooks, but they don’t have the best online information all the time. Foder’s and Frommers have been around and you know that kind of stuff so we basically look at the quality of the site, how long it’s been around, its reputation, who runs it, has it been around longer than a year or two we have to come up with these tests.

 

Jason: Can we determine who owns a domain name, if we can’t determine who owns a domain name and we don’t know their phone number or who they are there’s a greater chance that they’re a spammer or SEO or a network of sites when people have domains-by-proxy so we’re coming up with those tests. We also look to see if it’s a scraper site, there’s tons of Scraper sites out there, so if we determine it’s a Scraper site we wont use it. I would say that using Google is about 10 percent of the process. We cross reference across all the different services out there, you know delicious is very good and stumble upon is very good for finding unique stuff and if something is too ad heavy, you know if they’ve got three Google Ad sense on the top of the page and when it’s 800 by 600 pixels we can’t see the content, we wont list it and if we have to list it we’ll put the warning sign so we’re developing those tests actually Allen.

 

Allen Stern: Alright well I don’t want to hog the session, so yeah, move on.

 

Jason: Okay, so Andy. Andy you’re there and Andy now… it’s interesting. You gave me a little bit of a whipping about the terms and conditions, but…

 

Andy Beard: Well that was a little thing, but it could have been major if you didn’t have something to really sigh about it but it turned out to be a minor thing although I think that a lot of web 2.0 guise is a bit blasé about that type of thing and it might be a case that’s in a certain situation they might think that they own the terms and conditions where in fact the lawyer owns it and not only licenses it to them?

 

Jason: Well this terms and conditions was you know Odeo had done it and I think they had gotten it from etc and then Odeo gave us permission to do it so we actually had permission. So that was a none issue I guess so then you had the keyword stuff in your meta-tags because we had on the webpage 50 cent of these other things and that was actually an error on our part because that was an original list of things that were on the main page and we’re using media wiki software so a lot of times we’ll just do things because the media wiki software is doing that and you were kind of upset that you only had two negative points and you were trying to find more. I think you’re kind of a fan of Mahalo. Would that be correct to say that Andy Beard is a fan of Mahalo?

 

Andy Beard: Um not specifically, I would have done it better.

 

Jason: Oh you would have done it better?

 

Andy Beard: Yeah.

 

Jason: So what do you think of Mahalo what would you have done better?

 

Andy Beard: Well I can’t understand at the moment, for instance if these are the top search results, how come blogs can put together lists of fifty things and get a front page digg and have 50-60 thousand people go and visit a Blog page? I’ve been browsing around Mahalo and there’s all these perfect results pages. None of the pages have got diggs. And if you putting together the perfect results page it should be better than some two-bit blogger can put together. Surely each one of the these results pages should be digg-worthy.

 

Jason: Okay so the criticism would be nobody submitted it to Digg.

 

Andy Beard: No…I’m saying that people don’t think the results are good enough to submit to Digg which I think it significant at the moment. I don’t think so. Obviously I have a history with Digg, they don’t like me over there because of the whole hiring…

 

Andy Beard: Okay, on Netscape have you had any front page for some of your SERPs?

 

Jason: I don’t think so and I’ll tell you the reason. We’re search results, I think those are social news sites. So they’re looking for more news content. I wouldn’t actually suggest people submit us to Digg or Netscape and that’s why we didn’t put Digg and Netscape as links. We do have Facebook and StumbleUpon and Delicious and on the right hand side there on the sort of bookmark-this box, but I actually don’t suggest anybody submit it to Digg because it’s a search result, not a news story and Kevin Rose has been pretty clear that he wants Digg to be social news and I was pretty clear when I was running Netscape that I wanted it to be social news so if you put a press release in I automatically would disqualify it if you put in a link farm or a list of links we generally would decline running that so I think that’s the issue more than anything. What else do you think?