A few years ago Google's chief economist Hal Varian explained that scale is over-rated:

We're very skeptical about the scale argument, as you might expect. There's a lot of aspects to this subject that are not very well understood.
...
So in all of this stuff, the scale arguments are pretty bogus in our view because it's not the quantity or quality of the ingredients that make a difference, it's the recipes. We think we're where we are today because we've got better recipes and we have better recipes because we spent 10 years working on search improving the performance of the algorithm.

Wednesday Google's chief scientist Peter Norvig shared his view:

We don't have better algorithms than anyone else. We just have more data.

And this is why you see so many hucksters hyping trash, committing fraud, scamming users, cutting corners, and working legal loopholes at launch time to try to grow marketshare *at any cost*

Build the scale and you have the cashflow and feedback mechanisms in place to test viral marketing strategies, improve conversion rates, increase real (and perceived) relevancy, and lock in users.

"In a July 19, 2005 e-mail to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote: 'jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.'"
...
"Our dirty little secret... is that we actually just want to sell out quickly," said Karim at one point. In an e-mail, Chen talked about “concentrat[ing] all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil.” - Ars Technica

Welcome to the exciting world of innovation in online media!

Without brand you have nothing.

With brand even a wounded duck full of unauthorized scraped content like YouTube or Mahalo somehow manages flight, at least for a while. Then you only need to find someone dumb enough to buy the growth story and purchase the bag of smoke before the fire emerges.

Of course people don't have to cut corners, lie, cheat, and steal to build a real business. Those are the strategies employed by people trying to sell value where none exists. You can do just fine by dominating a small niche THEN leveraging data to grow. It is not sexy. You probably can't hype it to the media. It might not lead to an 8 or 9 figure payday. But then you won't have to describe your strategy as "whatever tactics, however evil.”

Some people email you out of the blue accusing you of things that are not true while being rude and condescending. One person stated that they were certain I sold their email and that I am unethical and etc etc etc

My response was short and sweet
"go ___ yourself. we don't sell our user information."

To which there was a response about how I am not very professional. And the thing is, how are you supposed to respond when people falsely accuse you of criminal conduct while using your services for free AND insulting you?

Is there a professional way to respond?

Does the person who gave you no benefit of the doubt, insulted you, and wasted your time somehow deserve the benefit of the doubt? If yes, why? They certainly didn't give you any.

The way I look at business is that being short and sweet (or short and sour, in some cases) is probably one of the most professional things you can do. You only have so many hours to live and you only have so much time to service paying customers. The worst thing you could do is give someone like that the benefit of the doubt after they walked all over you, because then they might become a customer. And that type of person tends to be abusive, lazy, rude, selfish, and ignorant. Not a good customer.

If you don't enjoy what you do then its best to stop doing it. Part of ensuring work is enjoyable is filtering out those who do not fit.

So if a person says "___ off" at hello, then, if you are concerned with professionalism, reciprocating is the best thing you can possibly do. Any other course of action simply wastes time that could be spent servicing real customers - which certainly isn't very professional.

I remember in 2nd grade when our teacher was teaching us how to do math I raced ahead and was doing lessons for today, tomorrow, and next week. The teacher rewarded my efforts by yelling at me and ripping up the pages from the book and giving me a 0 on that homework.

In fourth grade we would play around the world with math flash cards where you raced to say the answers, and I would literally go all the way around the classroom without losing. I won so much that the other kids would boo when I won and cheer if I lost. In 5th grade I scored well on some state examination test that they had me take a college level entry exam. I beat most college-bound high school students in math before I entered junior high school.

Between 7th and 8th grade we moved.

Somehow in 8th grade they put me in slow learners math. Maybe they were trying to balance the number of students in each class? While in slow learners math the teacher handed out these obscure word problem tests a few times a month. Every time we did them I would either tie with the winner or beat all the kids who were taking algebra.

There were other topics where I sucked. Anything to do with spelling fail. Writing? Not so good. Foreign language? No conozco! Typing - absolutely brutal.

All these years later I use the math and logic to make money writing words, and matching words up in patterns that algorithms like. But what more would I have done if I didn't waste 6 years of my life in the military? Maybe I wouldn't have fell into marketing, but it is almost impossible to do anything online and willfully remain ignorant to marketing. If you have any level of curiosity you will stumble into it (especially if you have any ambition and lack capital).

But education is to set up to beat the creativity out of you, punish outliers, and turn you into a debt slave consuming drone. You should respect authority, even if ill gained.

If students were any good at applying math & critical thinking to the real world there would be riots in the street.

Online critical thinking isn't typically appreciated either.

Social media makes one-liners great, so plan on including a few of them, and plan on some of your words being taken out of context and used against you.

Any form of criticism is defined as being linkbait or an attempt at capturing attention. As the web continues to saturate and it becomes more like the real world it will only get more absurd.

We are no longer in an “Information Age.” We are in the Age of Noise. Falsehoods, half-truths, talking points, out-of-context video edits, plagiarism, rewriting of history (U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, for example), flip-flops, ignoring facts (Cheney and torture for example), neatly packaged code words and phrases, media ratings focus, dysfunctional government (fillibusters have more than doubled, but most don’t realize Republicans are blocking everything), mainstreaming fringe causes….I could go on and on.

Is it any wonder why so many who are struggling with kids, jobs, rising medical costs, etcetera have such a tough time wading through all the crap?

There is only so much attention to go around. Anything you don't know = grab the ugliest segment of the market + embellish it & state that is what the entire market is. Easy. Anyone who is an SEO is a spammer who illegally hacks websites trying to sell overseas pharmacy drugs and rank for misspellings of birtney spaers. All domainers are cybersquatters & brand hijackers. Affiliates only push scams that use reverse billing fraud.

But when you go back to the math and think about it, the bottom 80% or 90% of ANY market usually isn't very exciting (or profitable, especially if you are a cog). It has been commoditized and doesn't reward creativity. It is doing the things at the fringe - the 1% where you have an artistic flair of brilliance which is seen by some as wizardry that produces profound results. It often backfires, at least off the start:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. -
Arthur Schopenhauer

You get beat up for a while and the market tests you (sometimes for years), but eventually it takes notice:

Through this experience, I learned an important lesson: When in doubt, make your product more compelling. All of Fog Creek's affiliate marketing ideas, coupons, discounts, direct-mail pieces, catalog ads, and everything else we spent time on -- none of this was as good a use of our time as simply doing what we loved best anyway: creating useful software.

The following is a guest post from Tom Demers.

One of the most pivotal aspects of driving large volumes of search traffic in most verticals is effectively targeting long tail keywords. While ranking for competitive phrases and developing link authority are certainly crucial aspects of SEO, much of ranking on long tail keywords is properly targeting and optimizing for them. A while ago Aaron made the following image as a conceptual example of how the relevancy algorithms may differ for different types of keywords:

This article will outline a three step process for targeting long tail keywords.

Step 1: Build a Basket

The first (and possibly most important) consideration is determining which keywords to target. For this I think a three-step process is best:

Traditional Keyword Research

It’s always a good idea to do some idea generation and to get a feel for the possible variations of your specific targeted keyword by utilizing a keyword research tool. For the sake of the article, we’ll assume that we’ve selected our “head” or core keyword target, and that we’re attempting to rank an article for the key phrase and related key phrases. Three tools that I find particularly useful for this purpose are Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool, and my company’s Free Keyword Tool.

Using Your Own Analytics

Really the best source of keyword data for determining the long tail keywords you can target is your own data. This is powerful because it shows you a variety of keyword combinations, the data is proprietary (your competitors didn’t pull the list from the same keyword tool you used, so they won’t be targeting the same keywords), and you have actual data both that you can rank for a given keyword, and you have an indication of how that keyword performs on your site. In Google Analytics, there a couple of reports you can pull to get this information (most analytics packages will provide you with similar capabilities). Drill down to traffic sources > keywords > non-paid:

Then you can create a filter for the head term. For the sake of this example we’ll say we’re targeting the phrase “long tail” and variations:

By creating the filter, we can see a variety of modifiers that the page and/or other content on our site are already driving. And, if we are in fact attempting to optimize an existing page for multiple keywords, we can utilize a content report to see what that page is already driving traffic for:

You can then see all of the queries driving traffic to that page. By analyzing the traffic and conversion statistics for that page, you can then start to feature more effective variations more prominently. The beauty of analyzing your own data lies in the fact that you can de-emphasize variations that don’t convert for your site.

Continually Iterate on Both Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis

Periodically, it’s a good idea to return to traditional keyword research, and to dig back into your analytics. This is particularly true if a concept or product is seasonal, but regardless the queries driving traffic to your site are bound to shift, and analyzing both the segment of keywords you’re targeting and the actual traffic to a given page can help to drive a tremendous amount of additional traffic to an individual page.

Step Two: Put It On The Page

Unless you coordinate an army of writers or build a venture-backed model around creating a piece of content for every phrase imaginable, you can’t create a piece of content for every phrase you want to rank for. As such you’ll have to effectively target long tail keywords by including the multiple phrases in your keyword bucket throughout the page:

• Varying the Title Tag and Header - In varying title tags and headers for SEO you are ensuring that your pages aren’t over-optimized and they include relevant long tail keywords you’ll want to target (rather than redundantly featuring the same keyword twice).
• Place Variations and Modifiers in Your Content - By researching the variations of a keyword you might want to include in your content, you can be aware of them as you craft content, and you can strategically place modifiers throughout your page’s content. For instance, it might not be natural for you write out the phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products” but if you know this is a phrase that drives some traffic, you can be sure to include phrases like “whether you are a retailer or an affiliate promoting products”. You’ll be using phrases like long tail keywords frequently enough that if the longer phrase is lower competition, you might not even need to include the exact phrase to rank for it. Note below that none of the ranking pages use the exact phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products”:



• Pay Attention to All of Your On-Page Elements - Be sure to work into your page’s headlines, bolded copy, alt attributes, title attributes, etc. the variations you’re targeting. By mixing up the words and phrases you use in these elements, you’re also ensuring your page isn’t over-optimized

Step Three: Building Links For Your Keyword Basket

Finally, even though many of your long tail keyword variations will rank on their own, you’ll want to develop some links with specific anchor text to these pages. You can do this in a few different ways:

• Vary Your Internal Links to a Page– Again, this allows you to avoid being “over-optimized,” and if you stick primarily to variations that contain the head keyword within the variation and append modifiers, rather than synonyms, you’re consistently transferring relevance for your core term.
• Use an Important Modifier in Your Headline – While your title tag is what’s seen by searchers, many people linking to your article will use your headline as anchor text. Using a variation here helps attract links for important modifiers
• External Links You Control- Things like company listings, directory listings, and nepotistic links often offer you the opportunity to control your own anchor text: while many times just leveraging internal links on an authoritative site is enough to rank, sometimes utilizing article submission Websites or other low-quality external linking sources with keyword-rich anchor text can help you to rank for mid to low-competition keywords.

Ultimately the best way to rank for long tail keywords is to build an authoritative Website and seed it with a lot of content, but on a page-by-page basis you can often leverage strategic keyword targeting and your own analytic data to help drive exponentially more traffic than you would focusing solely on the “head” keyword.

Tom Demers is the Director of Marketing with WordStream, a software company specializing in pay-per click software and keyword research and organization solutions for SEO. Tom is a frequent contributor at the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog.

When the internal Google remote quality rater guidelines leaked online there was a core quote inside it that defined the essence of spam:

Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

With the above quote in mind please review the typical Mahalo page

Adding a bit more context, the following 25 minute video from 2008 starts off with Matt Cutts talking about how he penalized a website for using deceptive marketing. Later into the video (~ 21 minutes in) the topic of search results within search results and then Mahalo come up.

Here is a transcription of relevant bits...

Matt Cutts: Would a user be annoyed if they land on this page, right. Because if users get annoyed, if users complain, then that is when we start to take action.

And so it is definitely the case where we have seen search results where a search engine didn't robots.txt something out, or somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there and they say search results or some comparison shopping sites don't put a lot of work into making it a useful site. They don't add value.

Though we mainly wanted to get on record and say that hey we are willing to take these out, because we try to document everything as much as we can, because if we came and said oh removed some stuff but it wasn't in our guidelines to do that then that would be sub-optimal.

So there are 2 parts to Google's guidelines. There are technical guidelines and quality guidelines. The quality guidelines are things where if you put hidden text we'll consider that spam and we can remove your page. The technical guidelines are more like just suggestions.

...

So we said don't have search results in search results. And if we find those then we may end up pruning those out.

We just want to make sure that searchers get good search results and that they don't just say oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost, and I didn't find what I wanted. Now I am angry and I am going to complain to Google.

Danny Sulivan: "Mahalo is nothing but search results. I mean that is explicitly what he says he is doing. I will let you qualify it, but if you ask him what it is still to this day he will say its a search engine. And then all the SEOs go 'well if it is a search engine, shouldn't you be blocking all your search results from Google' and his response is 'yeah well IF we ever see them do anything then we might do it'."

Matt Cutts: It's kinda interesting because I think Jason...he is a smart guy. He's a savvy guy, and he threaded the needle where whenever he talked to some people he called it a search service or search engine, and whenever he talked to other people he would say oh it is more of a content play.

And in my opinion, I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search.

And if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say 'you know, you need to have this much content on the page.' So I think various people have stated how skilled he is at baiting people, but I don't think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search or that even he seems to be moving away from ok we are nothing but a search engine and moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value.

One quick thing to note about the above video was how the site mentioned off the start got penalized for lying for links, and yet Jason Calacanis apologized for getting a reporter fired after lying about having early access to the iPad. Further notice how Matt considered that the first person was lying and deserved to be penalized for it, whereas when he spoke of Jason he used the words savvy, smart, and the line threaded the needle. To the layperson, what is the difference between being a savvy person threading the needle and a habitual liar?

Further lets look at some other surrounding facts in 2010, shall we?

• How does Jason stating "Mahalo sold $250k+ in Amazon product in 2009 without trying" square with Matt Cutts saying "somebody takes a cookie cutter affiliate feed, they just warm it up and slap it out, there is no value add, there is no original content there" ... Does the phrase without trying sound like value add to you? Doesn't to me.
• Matt stated that they do not want searchers to think "oh well I clicked on this and I am supposed to find the answer, and now I have to click somewhere else and I am lost" ... well how does Mahalo intentionally indexing hundreds of thousands of 100% auto-generated pages which simply recycle search results and heavily wrap them in ads square with that? sounds like deceptive & confusing arbitrage to me.
• Matt stated "and if you think about it he has even moved more recently to say 'you know, you need to have this much content on the page,'" but in reality, that was a response to when I highlighted how Mahalo was scraping content. Jason dismissed the incident as an "experimental" page that they would nofollow. Years later, of course, it turned out he was (once again) lying and still doing the same thing, only with far greater scale. Jason once again made Matt Cutts look bad for trusting him.
• Matt stated "I don't think anybody is going to make a strong claim that it is pure search" ... and no, its not pure search. If anything it is IMPURE search, where they use 3rd party content *without permission* and put most of it below the fold, while the Google AdSense ads are displayed front and center.
  • If you want to opt out of Mahalo scraping your content you can't because he scrapes it from 3rd party sites and provides NO WAY for you to opt out of him displaying scraped content from your site as content on his page).
  • Jason offers an "embed this" option for their content, so you can embed their "content" on your site. But if you use that code the content is in an iframe so it doesn't harm them on the duplicate content front AND the code gives Jason multiple direct clean backlinks. Whereas when Jason automatically embeds millions of scraped listings of your content he puts it right in the page as content on his page AND slaps nofollow on the link. If you use his content he gets credit...when he uses your content you get a lump of coal. NICE!
  • And, if you were giving Jason the benefit of the doubt, and thought the above was accidental, check out how when he scrapes the content in that all external links have a nofollow added, but any internal link *does not*
• Matt stated "[Jason is] moving more toward we have got a lot of people who are paid editors to add a lot of value" ... and, in reality, Jason used the recession as an excuse to can the in house editorial team and outsource that to freelancers (which are paid FAR LESS than the amounts he hypes publicly). Given that many of the pages that have original content on them only have 2 sentences surrounded by large swaths of scraped content, I am not sure there is an attempt to "add a lot of value." Do you find this page on Shake and Bake meth to be a high quality editorial page?
• What is EVEN MORE OUTRAGEOUS when they claim to have some editorial control over the content is that not only do they wrap outbound links which they are scraping content from in nofollow, but they publish articles on topics like 13 YEAR OLD RAPE. Either they have no editorial, or some of the editorial is done by pedophiles.
• Worse yet, such pages are not a rare isolated incident. Michael VanDeMar found out that Mahalo is submitting daily lists of thousands of those auto-generated articles to Google via an XML sitemap...so when Jason claims the indexing was an accident, you know he lied once again!

Here Jason is creating a new auto-generated page about me! And if I want to opt out of being scraped I CAN'T. What other source automatically scrapes content, republishes it wrapped in ads and calls it fair use, and then does not allow you to opt out? What is worse in the below example, is that on that page Jason stole the meta description from my site and used it as his page's meta description (without my permission, and without a way for me to opt out of it).

So basically Matt...until you do something, Jason is going to keep spamming the crap out of Google. Each day you ignore him another entreprenuer will follow suit trying to build another company that scrapes off the backs of original content creators. Should Google be paying people to *borrow* 3rd party content without permission (and with no option of opting out)?

I think Jason has pressed his luck and made Matt look naive and stupid. Matt Cutts has got to be pissed. But unfortunately for Matt, Mahalo is too powerful for him to do anything about it. In that spirit, David Naylor recently linked to this page on Twitter.

What is the moral of the story for Jason Calacanas & other SEOs?

• If you are going to create a thin spam site you need to claim to be anti-spam to legitimize it. Never claim to be an SEO publicly, even if you are trying to sell corporate SEO services.
• If you have venture capital and have media access and lie to the media for years it is fine. If you are branded as an SEO and you are caught lying once then no soup for you.
• If you are going to steal third party content and use it as content on your site and try to claim it is fair use make sure you provide a way of opting out (doing otherwise is at best classless, but likely illegal as well).
• If you have venture capital and are good at public relations then Google's quality guidelines simply do not apply to you. Follow Jason's lead as long as Google permits mass autogenerated spam wrapped in AdSense to rank well in their search results.
• The Google Webmaster Guidelines are an arbitrary device used to oppress the small and weak, but do not apply to large Google ad partners.
• Don't waste any of your time reporting search spam or link buying. The above FLAGRANT massive violation of Google's guidelines was reported on SearchEngineLand, and yet the issue continues without remedy - showing what a waste of time it is to highlight such issues to Google.