Jason Calcanis in Denial Part II
I 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 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?”
He even commented on the post, which was kind of cool. He said that 5-20% was a fair enough figure and that “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.”
Well, I was just browsing some Hitwise data and in November it looks like around 75% of traffic was from search engines. Ahh the sweet arms of Master Google.
Hehe, Jason Calacanis is a master at winding up the SEO community. He even gets free consultation out of it. Good on him.
And he absolutely knows that search traffic and the conversion from that to adsense clicks is where Mahalo makes its money, so he also knows value of a properly optimised site (he learnt that with Weblogs Inc). Fact is Mahalo is nearly perfect from an SEO perspective, while most sites simple are not.
I don’t think Mahalo isn’t going to change the face of search any more than About.com has, but it is going to be a nice little earner that’s for sure.