Jason Calacanis Still In Denial
Rich Skrenta, founder of Dmoz and Topix.net (err .com now), has a fantastic post with thoughtful advice and tactical tips for Mahalo.
And then Jason Calacanis waffles on in a response that basically says Mahalo is different to Dmoz because Dmoz has spam. Great. Thanks for your time Mr Skrenta!
I don’t know why this bothers me but it does. I guess because Calacanis has built a ‘PR platform’ around the web having low quality SEO spam pages and Mahalo saving the day that his message would be diluted in saying that he plans to make high quality SEO pages.
There is a very real way to see though. Jason could post what percentage of his traffic in December (enough time to get at least some Mahalo pages included in Google and trusted to some extent) came from search engines and what percentage typed in the URL directly. I would bet Jason a lunch at Nobu (I hear he likes it and it’s around the corner from my office) that it is 70% or more. How’s that for lunchbait?
Search engine traffic is real, I would never deny that. At Engadget, Autoblog, etc. we have 5-20% of our traffic come from search engines and that was fine. That search traffic is a nice way to introduce folks to the product and its value.
However, we tried to build services that were good enough that folks would remember the name and come back. Heck, our goal was to make the service so good folks wold tell their friends.
That’s the plan with Mahalo: make the best product we can and hope that it helps people enough that they a) come back and b) tell their friends.
Search traffic will be one of 10 different ways folks get introduced to the service along with our vlog, toolbar, Greenhouse, PR, offline marketing, word of mouth, community-driven efforts, etc.
I think that Rich is 100% correct that too many people build their business based on SEO and that its a VERY BAD idea. That being said, I think he is wrong that people don’t type About.com, Wikipedia, and IMDB into their toolbars every day–they do.
Just because some of those services get a lot of traffic from Google doesn’t mean they are not amazing standalone products that would do just fine without Google’s help. IMDB and Wikipedia would be just fine without search traffic.
I think the Nobu bet is a premature… I’m not even focused on SEO. I’m focused on the number of SERPS, number of Greenhouse Guides, quality of our SERPs, and our ability to update them. We could make a bet based on those things if you like, or we can just go to Nobu next door for a couple of rolls next time i’m in the city without a bet.
all the best,
Jason
Hey there Jason, no doubt about the fact you want people to remember the name and come back. And they will. But ironically the best SEO strategy is simply good content that gets talked about naturally. You can tweak the dials on the edges but the reality is that SEO is not something you do but something you can fuck up.
My argument is only that the relative sizes of the two will be different - that people coming directly will be a minority and people coming through search engines will be a majority. It’s just a fact of the user intent (task oriented) vs say a blog where you are interested in keeping abreast of a topic over time.
I think what you are doing is fantastic, but just that you would probably succeed more quickly if you embraced SEO as something that can be good and bad rather than all bad.
Either way, would love to grab a Nobu roll the next time you are in the city.
[…] made a theoretical bet with Jason Calacanis that Mahalo really was a well-lit SEO-optimized site, despite his constant denials back in August. The exact quote: “I would bet Jason a lunch at […]