jcalacanis

Google gives permission to some sites to do more. we are one of those sites.

Take a look at the how to play guitar chords page... it's everything you would want if you did that search.

people stay on that page for 20-60 minutes!!! and there are 50 people on that page all the time learning to play guitar chords. sorry it's not how to set up a cassandra cluster, but it is of value to people learning to do something basic.

best jcal

Thank you.... and I agree.

We are 100% SEO compliment to best practices and we delete/deindex/build out any community pages that are short every month. Google Knol, Wikipedia, About.com, eHow and Associated Content don't do this!

We are uber agressive about removing short pages, and investing thousands of dollars in top pages. like these two: http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-make-strawberry-shortcake http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords

These claims by hater SEOs are basically B.S. They take the last 10,000 pages the community are working on and say "gotcha!!! these pages suck!" Well, they are being worked on! Come back in 60-90 days and they will be built out or they will be deindexed. that simple.

... absurd.

If you want to obsess about me please continue... all your doing is making yourself look bad. It's silly to obsess to this level about one person. The Hacker News community is now looking at the account AaronWall as a spammer--way to go!

In terms of traffic we took a little hit when we removed the shorter pages, and we actually have a higher benchmark than anyone in the content space about what we index--and the search engines know this. We only rank stuff--on average--when it's 300 words or more. This means we have a much higher benchmark than About.com, Wikipedia and Google Knol.

we got this suggestion from you and it's actually concentrated our page rank to the high-quality, higher CPM pages.... the end result? When we removed the low quality pages our revenue grew 2.5x!!!

You are responsible for, literally, millions of dollars in revenue for Mahalo.... for that I think your tollish ways!

Sidenote: I've apologized to the SEO community a million times for saying SEO is BS. you're the one who won't get over it. Keep wasting everyone's time with your non-sense while I create more companies, invest in more companies and getting more stacks.

My life is unfairly epic, and your life is spent obsessing about that fact..... sad dude. really. The most attention and achievement you'll have in your sad little life is when you're throwing rocks at me. Sad.

I think you're once again trying to spam Hacker News with your own personal vendetta against me Aaron.

Most brands love when folks make fan sites or communities.

You're being intellectually dishonest here, using the term squatting when in fact that's not what we're doing. Take a look at Internet Brands and their forums for automotive:

http://www.internetbrands.com/our-brands/automotive/

They provide independent forums, with trademarks in the domains, for almost every car brand. These forums are high-quality and valuable.

If someone wants to make CalacanisSucks.com, CalacanisTalk.com and CalacanisQuestions.com I'm fine with it. Go ahead... talk about me all day long.

I mean, you're doing that anyone Aaron.

Seriously, you are a link baiting machine Aaron. However, don't you think it's a little sad that the most attention you've ever gotten in your life is when you're attacking me.

The folks on HackerNews are sick of Calacanis-Baiting... give it a rest please. I hate seeing my name on HackerNews.... in fact, can someone create a Chrome Extension that removes all posts that are by aaronwall and mention mahalo/calacanis?

thanks!

Also Aaron, I would read this article... :-) http://www.seobook.com/how-choose-great-domain-names

Actually, we're not trying to drive folks to Mahalo with these sites. We're actually happier if they stay on the vertical sites--which have higher CPMs.

Some updates for folks on SEO:

1. Domain names are not counted toward SEO. Links and quality content are what drives SEO. That is what you should really focus on.

2. Having more than one domain name doesn't help SEO--especially if they are all on the same group of servers. Google knows when one person owns all the same domain names and when they are all on the same servers. If you wanted to try and fool google you might be able to have 500 servers in 500 different locations running 500 different software profiles, etc. However, the amount of time to do that is greater than just making good content.

3. Putting keyword in a domain just makes it easier to remember. Which is worthwhile...

Actually Aaron, you can use a domain name with a brand in it.... take a look at wipo and you'll see dozens of examples of this. I've posted one below.

That being said, if someone had a problem with our Toyota Answers site or iPad Answers site we would discuss it with them.

Not sure that you understand what the term Cybersquatting means. Cybersquatting is when you sit on a domain name that is the same as someone's brandname and you try to sell it back to them.

What we are doing is creating a forum for the public to discuss a product or service. We also take the time to do a popup to keep people from being confused.

There are many internet companies that do this including the publicly traded Internet Brands which runs sites like corvetteforum.com.

Here's the Wipo link for you to get caught up...

best jcal

http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000... Based on the foregoing discussion, the Panel denies the Complaint under the Policy 4 (i) and the Rules 15. Complainant, Lockheed Martin Corporation, failed to show that the disputed domain names were confusingly similar to its trademarks. Therefore, the Panel orders that the disputed domain names <lockheedsucks.com> and <lockheedmartinsucks.com> remain registered in the name of the Respondent, Dan Parisi.

Ain't that the truth! I've got 10 or so SEOs who watch everything we do and send complaint letters by the dozens to Matt.

Keeps us on our toes to an absurd level.

It's not autoblogging, they are niche communities no different than HN or forums or StackOverflow.

As they grow you'll see us invest more in their design and build them out.

I'm not certain this will become a huge business for us, but our Q&A platform is really helpful for niche communities and I'm excited to see how it works.

Most folks won't hang out at a Yahoo Answers or Mahalo Answers, but they would hang out at an iPad Answers site or a Toyota Answers site I think.

Time will tell.

That's correct. These will either grow or fail based on their ability to build a community of passionate users.