Relevancy is a good thing. It makes search and the world more efficient. Many attempts at relevancy, like search is getting more social, may just create more noise. But computers are getting better at understanding language is a good thing "our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports."

But it seems each increase in relevancy justifies additional increases in irrelevancy to increase monetization.

'Accidental' Hijacking

Each individual piece sounds useful and helpful, but the end effect (and goal) is hijacking and misdirecting traffic to display more ads.

Search companies are hijacking publisher content to offer "answers" right in the search results, while testing displaying full images in the image search results.

Even when you claim your own business listing, Google will show your customers recommendations of other competing businesses on your business profile page. One of the best advertising based business models is extortion. And while the sum of the pieces may amount to that, certain ad networks are clever in how they tie it all together to *appear* innocent, even when acting like a shark.

What does a spam site do? Scrape content, misdirect visitors, and hope to get an ad click. Look at the above sequence through the same lens. It is the same thing - eeeeeeeeeevil.

SEO is Evil, Except When I Am Selling It!!!!

And yet a lot of the largest online spam publishers / scraper websites are taking a page out of Google's book...call SEO professionals scammers selling snake oil, while building search arbitrage businesses based on stealing third party content and wrapping it in ads. Perhaps the goal of charlatan douchebags like Dave Sifry and Jason Calacanis are to promote the Google anti-SEO public relations messaging in hoping that Google will not burn their sites to the ground. It may well work.

A popular SEO figure who sold a content management system based on cloaking mentioned at a secret meeting amongst Google's spam team and top SEOs that he loves turning in spammers. If he didn't promote Google's misinformed view he probably wouldn't get away with a business model built on cloaking.

What are Technorati and Mahalo but glorified scraper websites? And yet to promote such trash they claim to be search evangelists fighting for the purity of the search results (while they scrape scrape scrape).

While publicly those people trash SEO, they sell SEO services, and a friend told me that they are even using high pressure telemarketing and email spam to pitch "services" ... one such message I was forwarded stated:

Thanks for taking the time to review our new and improved demo. I'm glad you liked it and I'm forwarding you the PowerPoint version for you to truly experience the animation. Once you've distributed to the right parties I can always hop on a quick call to go through the demo really quick to really emphasize the value as an SEO component which is what the end result really is. Along the way you reap the benefits of having great content, a social media platform that all work to SEO and drive traffic. So even if up front the value is hard to fit into the normal SEO purchase, think of it as SEO with bells and whistles.

And as long as Google continues to rank the main scraper websites from such companies, that provides the proof of value which sells the garbage content to big brands. And so the above pitch was made by you-know-who, and Demand Media is going to start selling content to old media sites "One example Kydd mentioned was Demand’s partnership with the travel section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which, like most newspapers, is strapped for cash."

Quick question: what is to prevent Demand Media from partnering with hundreds of such media sites to leverage the combination of cheap labor, keyword earnings data, the media site's PageRank, and really just doing some serious damage to the search results? Unless the trend is altered, within 3 years almost any midtail to longtail keyword of value will have at least 7 of the top 10 results recycling the same poorly researched semi-legible informationless information.

All of the top Google search results say it is true. SO IT MUST BE!!!

AOL made a slight profit this past year and they are scaling a similar "content" business model, pushing tons of robo reporters to conduct flavor of the minute interviews.

Who Does This Hurt?

• searchers who may presume stuff in the search results is factually correct

• publishers which actually do real research and ensure their content is factually correct
• individual artists and authors who are experts but who are not hype driven & not self promotional enough to outrank dumbed down rewrites of their content heavily wrapped in Google ads

Recently there was an article about how fremium often does not work as well as advertised and the NYT highlighted Jaron Lanier's take on the online social contract:

“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

The above has been highlighted many times on this blog, but its damage has been far faster and far more widespread than even I anticipated.

Since Google is scraping so much CitySearch content, CitySearch felt the need to become a distributed content & ad network to remain relevant.

Strategic Advertising Fraud

Many solid publishers are getting lost in the ad mix:

The lingering effects of the economic recession, coupled with an expanding supply of efficient, and highly targeted online advertising networks, is reshaping the way big advertisers and agencies perceive the value of online media outlets. The result has been a pronounced polarization of the online advertising marketplace, with perceived demand rising for both the high-end of the most premium publishers and the low-end of ad networks and aggregators. This has caused perceived advertising value for the muddled middle of the marketplace - all but the most premium publishing sites, and the major online portals like AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo - to erode, as the ad industry focuses its attention on the top and the bottom players.

Those ad networks are (of course) full of fraudulent distribution which helps make them seem cheaper than they are, while leeching off the legitimate publishers and driving down CPM rates on legitimate media.

Click fraud has hurt the Google network's image, but a lot of it was isolated incidents from amateurs. While Yahoo! search got killed by fraud, Google still did pretty well.

But as Demand Media saturates their site the returns lower and they are in need of more links to get more "content" indexed. And so they are promoting a business model based on incentivized publishing, which includes both "The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it" and "Your family and friends are probably curious about what you are writing anyway. Send them links and invite them to take a look!"

Given that those author's articles are hidden in the bowels of a large site (and that they are already being encouraged to build exposure), how big of a jump is it to assume that some of them will search for this or this? How many of them will create unofficial click rings? How many will ask friends to click an ad while they view it? How will Google be able to detect such activity given the big smokescreen such a large site provides? They can't.

The Shifting Moat

As online ad networks become more polluted will that finally push brands into investing in top social media sites? Yes a lot of social media is seedy...but, increasingly, the "content" websites are not looking much better.

Who does the rise of content scrapers help? Those who are involved in the manufacturing of bulk misinformation, search companies which pay people to steal content and wrap it in their ads, and those who sell subscription content (well, up until some of the above outfits buy subscriptions to those sites to re-write and dumb down the content). In some markets (where the market leader is clear and obvious and oftenly referenced on the garbitrage websites) the backfill junk content might also help develop a competitive moat between the top brands and weaker competitors. It might also help some people involved in analytics, as more businesses need to squeeze every ounce of profit to stay alive.

Success from scratch in many polluted markets will require more grit, more scars, and better differentiation. As robotic content fills the search results, people will likely gravitate toward the expression of emotions. At the same time some employers are trying to prevent employees from having the opportunity to get their hands dirty, leaving an opportunity for competing businesses who want the additional exposure.

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Today I get to interview one of my favorite reads in the SEO blogoshpere, Andrew Shotland. Andrew runs the Local SEO Guide blog and has graciously taken some of his time to share with us his thoughts on Local SEO.

1. You have an enjoyable, albeit unique, writing style. Lots of people write about things worth reading but much of what they write, or how the present it at least, makes it pretty forgettable. How much has your style helped you in acquiring and keeping visitors to your site, landing clients?

With the blog I just try to be myself and talk about what I think is interesting - and let's face it local search, while often interesting, is not always interesting - so if I need to talk about doing keyword research for personal hygiene products to get my point across, so be it. It's no different in how i interact with my clients. I think half the reason my business works is because maybe I know what I am doing and the other half is because I am totally myself with my clients/readers.

While I am serious about helping my clients succeed, I try not to be too serious about much else. I have a friend who ran a pretty cool web start-up. His wife was a phd focused on the palestinian situation in gaza. I remember her asking him when he was going to stop wasting his life and do something serious. That stuck with me. I used to think building companies was a meaningful way to spend your life, and I still do, but compared to trying to solve Middle East peace problems, SEO is not exactly ghandi-type work. So you better enjoy it.

2. In reading your Local Search Predictions for 2010, I found the point about Google not allowing "agency accounts" with respect to their Local Business Center pretty interesting. I imagine it would make it harder on small businesses, who likely don't have time to manage their entire marketing campaign, to do the proper things within the LBC to make it work for them, thus make them less loyal to Google.

Do you think they will eventually implement that? They do that on the Adwords side and you can give agencies access to Analytics so what is with their reluctance with LBC? Do they want to engage the business directly and cut out the middle-person?

I really think they need to do this. First off, let's face it, a huge number of businesses would rather have an agency deal with their LBC account. But agencies have to trick Google into getting control of their clients' LBC accounts. It's really just ridiculous.

Even worse is that there are so many businesses that have problems accessing their LBC accounts when they part ways with an agency. That's a big problem. So it would make a lot of people's lives much easier to have a system that solves these problems.

That said, Google's POV on this is quite interesting. Googlers that work on LBC will tell you that the reason why many businesses would prefer an agency to manage their LBC account is not because these businesses have better things to do than figure out how to use the LBC, but rather because the LBC software design is not optimal. So if they come up with a better software design, then more businesses will use the service and there won't be a need for agencies. I like the apollo-13/mcgyver-like thinking here, but i think that flies in the face of everything I've ever experienced with how SMB's operate.

So I am optimistic that we'll get some kind of agency user thing happening this year. But then again I thought health care reform would get passed in '09 so what do I know?

3. Some marketers entering the "local" scene have preconceived notions about local SEO/PPC not being worth the effort because "most small businesses are cheap, they don't want to listen, and there is no search volume anyway". How real are the concerns and was/is that something you've experienced?

A. There's a ton of local search volume and Google, for one, has made big efforts to drive more web search traffic to local businesses (e.g. the 10 pack).

B. A lot of small businesses are definitely gun-shy about spending $ on SEO and search in general, but they are not stupid. The past year was a real watershed moment in terms of the number of SMB's jumping on the SEO bandwagon. The number of companies selling these services has gone through the roof and there are plenty of success stories out there. So the questions from a lot of these SMB's has gone from "wtf is SEO?" to "I know i need to figure this out. How can you help me?" While it's still a tough pitch to get a lot of these smaller co's to make the investment, all I can say is that there are plenty who are willing to step up and these are the ones who get great results and then help bring their peers into the market.

4. You mentioned a lot of small business can be gun-shy from an investment standpoint. Is getting a commitment on the dollar amount you need to make the campaign work the biggest hurdle in dealing with local SEO clients? If not, what is?

In my experience it's not very hard to get money out of the clients who understand the value of SEO, or at least those who understand that they need to understand the value. If they don't get it, then they are probably not worth pursuing. In my experience, the biggest challenge with these guys, big or small, is getting them to work on their sites to make sure that they are set up to convert. I am constantly surprised at businesses that know how to put together a TV or print ad that is designed to drive people into the store but don't bother to apply the same rigor to setting up their web pages. This is a big reason why so many of us in the SMB marketing world use pages other than the client's website to drive leads.

5. There are lots of places to advertise a site outside of search from a local marketing standpoint. what is your opinion on twitter, Facebook, and/or MySpace for local companies? The buzz seems to be Facebook is great for local businesses and local events, Twitter can be hit or miss, and MySpace is ehhhh.

The consensus in my little corner of the search marketing world is that Facebook is the place to be these days. Lot's of cheap, highly qualified, easy-to-target traffic. I have found Twitter to be an interesting source of traffic, but you have to be pretty creative about it. You need to be a lot more socially engaged in Twitter to get a lot out of it. I think Twitter and Facebook are going to get a lot more locally-oriented over the next year so it should be fun to watch. Nothing against MySpace, but it's not really a factor in my work.

6. Have you experienced any discernible difference between using the free listings vs paid listings/premium services on some of the big IYP's you mentioned in your Top IYP's for SEO 2009 post like Citysearch, Yelp, etc?

one of the biggest opportunities for local businesses is to understand how to optimize not just for Google, yahoo & Bing, but also for the big IYP's the traffic that comes from these sites is uber-qualified and most of the time businesses that are advertising on these sites usually just set it and forget it. if you learn how to optimize your ad on say yellowpages.com, you can probably get just as much if not more business than from a well placed Google maps listing. for some of these sites there's no discernible benefit to having a paid v. free listing, but for a few of the biggies, the paid listings allow you to manipulate your listing so that you can better optimize for the site's internal search as well as for Google

7. What is the best way you find for targeting local keywords, since keyword tools aren't so good at it? Checking the popular variations of broader terms and tacking on local modifiers or just jumping right into Adwords upfront when you take on a client?

Adwords is really the best way to test if there is traffic for a locally modified keyword, but of course most SMB's would rather not spend the $ to figure that out. Most RBB's (Really Big Businesses) won't spend the bucks to figure this out either so why should the little guys be any different? That said, I have done enough of these projects for both big and small local search clients that I have a pretty good handle on what the queries are like for the big categories. And once you have done one in a market, the variation from market to market is usually not too big so you can kind of cookie cutter it a bit for those clients in new markets that don't want to invest the time/money to test. This will likely cover 90% of the good queries.

---

Thanks a bunch Andrew, great stuff as usual. To read more about Andrew and get more great local SEO tips and techniques please visit and subscribe to his blog over at LocalSeoGuide.Com

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Mark Cuban recently talked about how search engines and content aggregators are vampires.

There is no reason to be indexed in Google. ... You haven’t gotten anything back

But he failed to disclose how his Mahalo investment loots content.

If Google is a vampire (while sending away billions of Dollars of traffic for free) then what does that make Mahalo (which borrows your titles and abstracts as content to pull search traffic into their ad cluttered pages pages, while placing your content below the fold (while using nofollow on attribution links))?

Is the following accurate?

If you think otherwise, then please explain. ;)

Danny Sullivan TORE UP Mark Cuban in a must read article which only Danny could have wrote. It is well worth a read for anyone who wants to understand the hypocrisy behind the Mahalo position on content scraping / vampiring.

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HOPE is perhaps the single most lucrative thing to sell.

There are so many people in need of direction, while so few actually want to do the work required to achieve the end goal. Thus many scammers sell the end result up front while glossing over the hard work required to get there.

I was over at a friend's house in the bathroom and saw a copy of "Your Infinite Power to be Rich" sitting on the floor & flipped open to a random page...page 102

THE UNIVERSAL BANK

A salesman needed an automobile for his new job, but he had no money with which to purchase one. However, he knew how to draw a check on his mental bank.

He told me that after he got the job, he went back to his room and formed the mental image of the car he wanted, with the positive certainty that it would be given him.
...
He struck up an acquaintance with another man in his apartment house who was going to Europe for six months and who said to him, "use my car until I return, and by that time you will be able to buy a car of your own."

If you ever read crap like the above please make sure to burn it, as it is useless.

Anything that requires you to close your eyes while listening to a marketer should make you assume they are preparing to work on another one of your orifices.

Many people who become rich are still unsatisfied by material possessions. And they often let the important things around them fall apart because they are too singularly focused.

Irrational Tweet From a Rich Man

A couple years ago a somewhat well known VC wanted to invest in us, but we had a bad gut feeling right from the get go.

Fast forward to December of 2009 and the guy who did that was Tweeting about a hate site he made for his wife, who he is now going through the divorce process with. Not once, but something crazy like a half dozen times. And in between these Tweets he is Tweeting...

• asking if anyone knows a bulldog divorce lawyer
• about his new self published book which contains the word Peace in its title
• how he needs some new executives for some projects

Who is the desired audience there? I mean after a person knows you will put up a hate site for your own wife, that you would be the type to sick bulldog lawyers on them, and that while you are doing so you are talking about Peace and are trying to recruit business partners ***in the same channel***

Crazy irrational.

But that is what happens when people are emotionally charged and lack balance.

Greed is justified by more greed and nothing else matters.

But what is the end goal?

You can't take money to your grave*

*Even the king of pop's gold plated casket only cost $25,000.

The Caustic Effects of Get Rich Quick Marketers

Ryan Healy recently pulled back the curtains on many internet marketing gurus, the lawsuits amongst them, and the general damage they inflict onto the market. Fake retirements used to cloak legal restraining orders against certain business practices, not paying affiliates, credit cards shutting down payment processors, etc etc etc.

The people who sell the image of the perfect lifestyle to suckers are the exact same people doing business deals with "partners" in the court room and going through divorce...something so scary sounding that I couldn't imagine it.

If you are already drowning in cash, but can't be honest with yourself and your loved ones, then why the need for a few more Dollars? What will they buy? Some hookers and a few STDs?

The Big Banks Are Just as Bad

This sort of crap happens at all levels though. It is so ingrained that many people just assume that if you make a lot of money you must be criminal or doing something morally reprehensible.

And from an affiliate perspective, when you look at the market segments that pay the most it is often the seediest ones (or the ones that are propped up by systemic fraud). A few years ago the mortgage market would pay a lot for leads because that is where the systemic fraud was.

Exhibit A:
2004, CNN.com - FBI warns of mortgage fraud 'epidemic'

Exhibit B:

Imagine if you had key market insights and could trade on unreleased government information. A guaranteed source of easy profit exploited by some (especially when those people in government used to work for your company). And yet it is not enough. They need to steal more. There is a sickness in society that stems from our broken model of capitalism & materialism...where the central bankers flat out lie/cheat/steal to make even more money.

A nice take on it:

Despite the housing bust and financial crisis, very many of the people whose poor choices generated the housing bubble would make the same choices over again if circumstances repeat. Many industry participants, even those whose firms eventually went bust, were very well remunerated for their poor practices and, whatever their regrets, they kept the money. No one wants to create a catastrophe. But financial professionals want to remain free to make money in the ways that they know, and those are not good ways.

In July of 2007 former Citi CEO Charles Prince said, "As long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing."

And now that those people crashed the economy, the opportunity is to sell get rich quick at home doing nothing in your underwear overnight guaranteed. And there is money to be made in helping you fix your credit (since the above mentioned criminal elite class got a free pass while stealing your money and devaluing your savings while robbing the country blind).

Time vs Character

In an environment where such bubbles are core to the economy there is a lot of uncertainty. What is the best strategy? Who should I trust?

One of the best strategies I have found is simply time. Give a shady person enough time and they will reveal their character (divorcing their wife over money, etc). Granted I haven't always been perfect (and especially not when I was in the military), but you can't find many (any?) blog posts about me ripping someone off. Likewise with the people I look up to. Where is it shown that Seth Godin or Eric Janszen or Danny Sullivan took someone for a ride? Nowhere. In spite of a a decade+ of experience.

Every day there is an opportunity to max short term revenues or long term staying power. Each choice and each interaction is somewhere on a continuum. Focus too much on short term revenues and a lot of the things that set you apart disappear.

One of the things Google does with their relevancy algorithms is to trust older and more established websites. You can fake a lot of things, but it is a bit harder (or more expensive) to fake age. And age is what sets apart a lot of the legitimate businesses from the above listed "entrepreneurs" who only need time to reveal their character.

Business vs Base Jumping?

Starting a business is a lot like more like base jumping than it is just following a hope map. Most the stuff you do won't work, but you only need to stay in one piece until you safely reach the ground. Sure you must have hope to get through the bad patches, but you also are forced to constantly improve to keep up with the market. Which is why a site called SEOBook.com sells an SEO training program (rather than an ebook) in 2010. ;)

Here is one of the secrets in plain sight that the opportunistic types rarely show you.

That was the growth of search volume last year. STILL over 20%!

Years ago my mentor told me that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint.

In the longrun thin won't win, but (so long as you care) you can start off bad on low volume and get somewhere pretty quick when your field is growing at a 20%+ rate. And if you are new to the field you should be able to grow faster than the market because many business inputs have multiplier effects. You increase your growth geometrically as you

• learn to optimize your traffic flow
• increase your knowledge
• increase the value of your knowledge
• refine your strategy
• refine your product or service
• improve your conversion rates

Slow and steady isn't sexy. And it doesn't sell well.

But it works. :)

A further benefit to slow incremental growth is that as you grow your tribe and focus on their needs your customers become salesmen...helping attract more people just like them. And these are people who are pre-sold on what you have to offer, and why it is valuable. To a jaded audience testimonials from friends are far more valuable than sales copy. And almost everyone gets screwed into buying junk at least once before they find you.

Sales copy will likely push the quick returns no matter what (because that is what people want), but pay special attention to if someone is trying to use an aura of mystique on a brand new discovery as a marketing angle, while having little history. If they don't have much history the odds of buying a bag of smoke are much greater.

And if the recommendation comes with a big loud launch sequence then the chance of it being crap are even greater. And even if it starts out pure, the aim to "optimize" revenues at any cost often causes many partnerships to dissolve. Starting off slow and steady keeps things balanced and prepares you for growth.

Why Heavily Hyped Launches Are Often a Bad Idea

Wealth that comes quickly and easily often disappears the same way. Everyone has their hands in the cookie jar of success until the cookies are all gone.

When you are new to a market there are so many things to learn, refine and improve. Typically customers driven by hype are the most demanding (because an affiliate often oversells the product to get the commission) and the least qualified to succeed (since they want to rule the world in a day). The customers sold on a whole lot of hype and a whole lot of hope are basically set up to fail, trying to go too far too fast. They tend to buy on impulse, lack follow through, have a far higher rate of churn, a far higher rate of refund requests, and a far higher rate of chargebacks.

Further, every piece of a business can be optimized - from choosing who you want your customer to be, to who you don't want it to be, to what types of interactions to build, to what prices to charge, to balancing time spent on servicing customers vs growth, etc etc etc ... right on through to managing your personal load and fixing programming bugs (when we first launched our membership site the programmer made it such that if a person canceled they couldn't rejoin (even if the cancelation was due to an expired or stolen credit card))! But if you keep accepting feedback and incrementally improving you prepare yourself for heavy load by the time you build it.

Whereas a pull the cord and hope this works approach with lots of hype will almost always lead to disappointment and frustration. You probably want to test the equipment before jumping off the mountain :D

Even if the claims about non-payment in this lawsuit are NOT correct, it doesn't make a business look professional if they have publicly accessible lawsuits claiming that the fulfillment partner of choice is incompetent.

Long after the launches details leak out and experiences are shared. And that is what builds your reputation...good or bad. The slow and steady growth model offers time to fix errors and refine strategy. The launch and hope model doesn't.

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Publicly Jason claims to be ignorant about SEO because it allows him moral flexibility and makes Google less likely to torch his site (even though he is blatantly violating their search quality guidelines, and has for *years*).

But when you look at the sales material that Mahalo pitches to corporations, in the 19 page PDF reads like an à la carte menu of SEO services, rather than sales material from a company ignorant of of SEO.

It includes a slide which highlights how well Mahalo Answers questions rank in Google titled "SEO value," as well as the following statements (followed by my comments):

• Questions are imported from Partners’ Answers Community into Mahalo Answers, enabling 100% share of voice and high SEO value. (filling Google with duplicate content)
• Category Selection Based on Keyword Intelligence and Customer Goals (doing keyword research, an SEO service)
• Community seeded with high-value questions and answers (does the word "seeded" mean asking fake questions?)
• By carefully policing the site, Mahalo keeps out inappropriate content, thus increasing engagement and utility. (no mention of the half million+ pages indexed in Google which contained scraped 3rd party content?)
• We can help our partners increase their search engine rankings with these high quality pages. (that is the actual text from their slide titled "HowTo")
• Mahalo’s team of editors will find the most highly-trafficked search terms and keywords for your brand, industry or product and build corresponding high-quality pages that will rank well. (isn't that exactly what "scummy" SEO companies do Jason?)

Given that Mahalo is now branded as an SEO play (in their own words), and that they scrape millions of content listings to publish on their pages, are creating tons of other duplicate content, have actively engaged in link farming, and are not above "seeding" questions based on keyword value, why should Google trust *any* of their business practices going forward? Especially when their SEO services enterprise was launched on the back of calling SEOs scumbags.

How can the Google web spam team members look themselves in the mirror each morning hunting smaller webmasters and ignoring operations like Mahalo? It must begin to feel arbitrary at some point, no?

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I was talking to a friend yesterday who was at a conference where Demand Media's CEO spoke, and he stated that nobody asked the big question: "what if google decides they don't like you anymore?"

Then I got thinking about how Google torched Squidoo after Jason Calacanis went on his public campaign to rebrand it as spam. But today under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo (which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter*) not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just "borrows" your content without permission and keeps all the cash.

In the past Google hated content scrapers pretty bad. How bad? Well a guy named Teeceo used to make scraper sites, and here is how Matt Cutts described his work:

In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.

Imagine taking that approach to hunting search spam all day long, and then ignoring the *fact* that Mahalo is scraping millions of third party listings and using them as content with no editorial filtering.

Then I started thinking about why the Google spam team could ignore something as outrageous as Mahalo, especially when it was built by a guy who was a false anti-spam evangelist. Is it because Jason is a good guy? No. Is it because there is some actual editorial vetting of the content? no. Is it because Google is getting a cut of the AdSense revenues? Google doesn't need the short term cash flow (look at all the affiliate AdWords advertisers they just torched), so that is too cynical of a view.

Yes Google wants display inventory (their biggest opportunity for 2010 according to the quarterly call), and these "content" websites have already given themselves over to Google as inventory. But it must be something deeper than that. So I started thinking about it from a longterm strategic level...

Google won't penalize sites like Mahalo (even though they blatantly violate Google's guidelines) because Google *wants* to use the works of companies like Mahalo, Demand Media, and Aol to lower the value of other content and bankrupt a lot of the traditional media companies.

Why would Google want to do that?

There is excessive duplication in the marketplace. The faster that duplication is driven out of the marketplace the more desperate companies will be to cut deals with Google. And while there is a down market Google can drive companies out of the market and just claim that it was the economy that did it (much like how Mahalo used the down economy as an excuse to fire most of their editorial staff and replace them with content scraping robots).

Once a lot of media companies are bankrupted, the market is far more efficient, and there are fewer mouths to feed, that means Google can squeeze greater profits margins out of the media ecosystem by getting a fatter cut of the ad revenue.

Currently this shift is risk free because almost nobody understands how the marketplace works. Sure Paul Kedrosky and Mike Arrington blogged about the search results getting spammier, but until you frequently read the above listed sequence on sites outside of the SEO industry there is no damage to the Google brand in them turning the internet into a cesspool.

Once it starts harming the Google brand then I suspect them to act quickly and decisively. And sites like Mahalo will see a sharp drop in traffic. Jason better milk it while he can. The clock is ticking.

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On Hacker News, Melvin, from Web Design Company, had a great analogy on the Mahalo business model

Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening.

Let's say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don't mention who the band is and on their website, they put up a link to download the song... but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, "hey, playing good songs gets us more listeners and more listeners gets us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let's do this more often." So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve.

Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.

In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.

Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.

The analogy isn't 100% perfect...but it *is* pretty darn close. :D

Jason is not 100% Jim McCormick, but he isn't 0% either.

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Ben Edelman: "Although I had asked that the Google Toolbar be "disable[d]," and although the Google Toolbar disappeared from view, my network monitor revealed that Google Toolbar continued to transmit my browsing to its toolbarqueries.google.com server"

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Many experienced advertisers realize that there are many gotchas in the AdWords system...optimization tools and default setting which optimize to boost Google's yield at the expense of unsuspecting advertisers, who don't yet know what match types are or that their ads are syndicated to content sites by default.

To help new advertisers get past many of the gotchas we created the Google AdWords tax calculator - a free utility which highlights many stumbling blocks that catch new AdWords advertisers.

Given that each keyword market is unique it would be impossible to make a tool that was 100% accurate in every situation, but the goal of this tool was to simply highlight common issues, and help new advertisers address them. Individual efficiency gains may be greater or smaller than the rough initial estimates the tool provides.

Please let us know what you think, as we will gladly iterate this calculator to make it better if you have some great ideas you think we should include in it. Like all of Google's products, our calculator is starting out in beta :D

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Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?

The short answer is no.

The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are...

• well branded
• well funded
• operating at scale
• good at public relations
• wrapped in AdSense ads

...the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine.*

*based on Mahalo.com

Mahalo SEO Spam Case Study

The Sales Pitch & Launch

Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay.

He had a multi-month sales pitch leading up to the launch of his site where he kept stating that Squidoo is spam and kept calling SEOs scumbags so he could pull in attention and links. This was well received by SEO conference organizers because people would talk about how outrageous Jason's speech was online, so (seeking marketing for their conferences) the SEO conference organizers acted like lap dogs standing in line waiting for their turn to have Jason call their paying attendees scumbags.

The publicity strategy worked great as it helped land Jason some mainstream press coverage and a lot of ditto head bloggers (who lacked either the experience or the mental faculty needed to see the bigger picture) got behind Jason.

The Wikpedia page about Mahalo reflects the public relations driven misinformed pitch

Search results quality

Mahalo's goal is to improve search results by eliminating search spam from low-quality websites, such as those that have excessive advertising, distribute malware, or engage in phishing scams. Webmasters have a vested interest in seeing their sites listed. Calacanis has said that algorithmic search engines, like Google and Yahoo, suffer from manipulation by search engine optimization practitioners. Mahalo's reliance on human editors is intended to avoid this problem, producing search results that are more relevant to the user.

When people steal/borrow/syndicate content without any editorial value add or original content, and then wrap it in ads that is generally considered spam. We will come back to that topic later, I promise! ;)

Early Media Success

Around the above conversation flowed a bunch of links, which helped Mahalo get off to a fast start. At first Jason claimed he wanted to create "the best" content for the most popular search queries. Many members of the media were duped by Jason's misinformation, as well reflected in the cNet article titled Jason Calacanis' Mahalo: Screw the long tail:

Instead of a server farm that crawls through the entire known Web so it can automatically match Web pages to the queries you type, Mahalo's search results are created by humans, in anticipation of the queries its users will type in.

How can this possibly work? Because, Calacanis says, the top 10,000 search terms account for 24 percent of all searches. If you can create great results for the top results, users will learn to appreciate the difference between machine search results--which are often thrown off by spam and poor-quality links--and human-powered search pages, lovingly created by caring search editors. For the obscure "long tail" queries that make up the 76 percent of search terms, Mahalo will serve up Google results.

Their first x articles were typically thin link lists, but hand generated. But since the pages were just link lists they were not remarkable enough to be linkworthy and the service was not sticky enough to keep people coming back. So Mahalo also decided to ramp up link building & awareness using 4 strategies:

• heavy internal cross linking of similar keywords
• create "how to" guides (and other in depth editorial) that were well formatted and fairly in depth
• use nepotism and social media spam to promote those articles
• encourage employees to create spam blogs to promote link lists of articles on Mahalo (example screenshot below, from a person who claims to proudly have never seen a superbowl, but allegedly likes the commercials)

A person who claims to have worked for Mahalo named Matthew Wayne Selznick wrote:

Regarding the Mahalo Blog Network: I don't know how recent that screenshot is, but it's amusing to see the blogs of several people who have either left the company or were laid off last October, when half the in-house editorial staff (including myself) was purged.
...
When I was working for Mahalo, staff were strongly encouraged to get blogs if we didn't have them and blog about Mahalo whenever there was a high-traffic opportunity like an awards show, sports or political event.
...
I unsubscribe from the blogs of my former co-workers when the majority of their posts are Mahalo link parades, just as I unsubscribe from any blog when it becomes a mouthpiece.

Their content was not Pulitzer prize level, but the strategy paid off and they started pulling in search traffic.

Strategy Shift

In spite of claiming that he just wanted to dominate the short head of search volume, that is not how Mahalo started gaining search traffic. Even if they poured hundreds of Dollars into a piece of content the generalist content with little to no topical expertise could not compete for the most competitive and highest traffic search keywords.

You need to have something useful or original to add to the conversation if you want to compete for the most competitive keywords, and penny pinching outsourced content doesn't get the job done there.

Instead what happened was that they ranked almost instantly for keywords like "best computer speakers" even with low quality scraped content.

Around the time I highlighted the emergence of that strategy, Google's Matt Cutts was interviewed about it and claimed that it was fine because Jason Calacanas was using MediaWiki to create his site. Jason also did a bit of damage control in a Sphinn comment where he claimed the spam pages were "experimental pages" that "we are no indexing"

In his own words:

That was 671 days ago. What has happened since?

A Prediction

Around the time of the above incident John Andrews (who gets the SEO field as well as anyone does) stated:

Everyone just copy Jason Calcanis and Mahaloo, ok? That sounds like a GREAT idea. Jason dissed SEOs in public, at a keynote, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he wasn’t quite so ignorant of SEO any more, and is now working the SERPs as a black hat SEO. Jason dissed affiliates in public, at a keynore, on purpose, and then learned a bit so he’s not as ignorant of affiliate marketing as he was before, and now Mahaoloo has embedded (inline) affiliate links (take a look.. added since Affiliate Summit). I think every "Learn how to Make Money Fast on the Internets" web site should simply point to Mahaoulo and say "copy them.. they are riding the black edge of gray hat SEO" and be done with it. So simple... just copy them. As they add pages, add splogs on those same topics because those are money terms. Every time they link to some resource, link to it from that blog. Scan technorati for Jason’s comments, and add one of your own right into that thread.. every time. Let Jason pave the way to profits.... each time he justifies his spam, he’s justified YOUR spam as well. Every time he explains how he’s not a spammer, he’s explaining why YOUR not a spammer either. Best of all, he’s being your spokesperson for FREE!

Was John Andrews once again correct? Lets take a look behind the curtains :D

What Happened?

Well the above computer speakers page that was highlighted still ranks in the top 5 search results in Google.

And the site has been growing quickly, with traffic increasing at least 3-fold over the past couple years.

Jason used the economic downturn as a convenient excuse to fire most of their editorial staff. But a big piece of that traffic growth is that they have got more sophisticated in their content scraping strategy.

To appreciate how reliant their model is on scraping content, I want you to see how a new page starts off.

Once you strip the ads and scraped content from that page there is nothing left but branding & navigation.

Two other noteworthy things about that page are that it was generated by a robot (see below) and that it is already indexed in Google. Once you have enough domain authority you can publish automated scraped garbage and rank well in Google. It is the Mahalo strategy.

That page (which was automatically generated in under a minute by a fake user robot named searchclick) is already ranking well in Google! How do you know searchclick is a fake user? Well look through all the different pages they created in under a minute over the course of the last year...likely 10,000's of them.

Understanding the Insidious Nature of Mahalo's Scraping

Search engines like Google scrape content so that they may provide a service of value to end users *and* publishers. When they make your snippets they are used to help promote your website.

What Mahalo does is take snippets, and publish them as content on their site. So they use your page titles and your content snippet to rank their site using your content, without your permission.

If you optimize your page titles on a new blog post you are helping to feed relevant optimized content into the Mahalo machine. They will scrape it, and if you are less authoritative than they are, they will likely outrank you!

To add further insult to injury, they put nofollow on links back to the content source which they are scraping content from, so while they are "borrowing" your content you are not getting any link credit for it.

And It Gets Worse!!!

As abusive and as extreme as the above sounds, it is actually only the first step in the process.

What happens next is that if your content (published on Mahalo without permission) causes the Mahalo page to rank for new valuable keywords then they may feed those keywords into their page generation tool and keep making more auto-generated pages in that area, leveraging their domain authority and YOUR content to compete against you while building an automated spam empire.

Some of the top earning pages might have freelancers thicken them out, but the only reason humans are involved at that stage is to legitimize the mass content scraping farm that is the base of the operation. If a company has 200,000+ automated pages with 0 overhead that make 5 cents/day each that is real cashflow - $10,000+ per day of profit!

Still not convinced of the profit potential? Mahalo.com has ~ 300,000 pages indexed in Google. On auto-generated pages it is far easier to get people to click an AdSense ad than it is to get them to buy something from Amazon.com (and you profit on 100% of the ad clicks vs only 1% of the Amazon.com clicks that convert). While there are 4 AdSense blocks *above* the Amazon.com affiliate links, Jason did $250,000 on Amazon's affiliate program last year "without trying" (again, his own stats in his own words...see Flickr.com/photos/jasoncalacanis/4234615626/ ).

Putting it All Together

If you build link equity and are good at public relations you can get away with murder in Google. Scale it big enough and the guidelines simply do NOT apply to you.

Most people who try to "pull a Mahalo" and spam up Google will likely fail because they lack

• the public relations & affiliations needed to attempt to legitimize such a strategy
• the willingness to lie just to get a bit of media ink
• the public relations & media savvy to pull such a major bait and switch without getting caught
• the domain authority to make it work algorithmically

Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay. Now that he is scraping your content (and adding nofollow to the links to your content) I think he is right. You are losing out on your search traffic because an authority site is "borrowing" your content and outranking you with your own content.

Jason got Squidoo penalized by calling it spam, and under the same level of scrutiny, how is Mahalo which scrapes millions of 3rd party content listings *without any editorial filter* not spam? Squidoo at least donates $10,000 a month to charity. Mahalo just steals your content without permission and keeps all the cash.

Are the search results going to start filling up with Twitter recycling start ups? What happens when the media gets in on this "what the bloggers have to say" scraping game? Does it even matter who created the content so long as someone wraps it in ads & ranks it?

I don't think we can stop people from being greedy or stealing, but I am surprised Google has turned a blind eye to this process. Is this what they want the web to become?

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