Jason Calacanis' Take on Google's Algorithm Change | Hacker News Reader

Jason Calacanis' Take on Google's Algorithm Change

mattcutts.com

59 pointsmikeknoop33 comments

So what Jason is saying is that they're actually going to earn their Google rankings, and thus admitting that before now they hadn't? Now they can say with a straight face that their results are good, instead of lying about it?

I mean, I had that impression about Mahalo already, but it's weird to see him admit it's true like that.

A little cynical are we? I like that. :-)

We had pages in the past that were not spam, but I would say they were on the ehow "lighter" side (think < 300 words.

We now are focused on getting experts into our studio and building content around their expertise. This is about 10-25x more expensive, but I don't see any other choice. Google is going to smack down anyone who makes them look bad by trying to rank lower-quality stuff.

We rank only 5th for how to play guitar chords, but ask yourself would rather use this page: http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords/

or ones in front of it like: http://guitar.about.com/library/weekly/aa071200e.htm and http://www.guitaralliance.com/guitar_lessons/guitar_chords/i...

out page is clearly the best.... over time google will move us up i'm sure.

big loser in this is ehow for going wide and not deep.

Actually I totally agree. I know nothing about guitar, but for that example Mahalo is the page I would go to first. Its bright, looks maintained and more importantly has a lot of what appears to be good content.

Could someone who actually knows anything about music comment on this one? I would be curious to know if the content here is actually better.

I've been in the process of picking up my guitar and learning a little, and it seems pretty legit. There's detailed explanations and some good videos, but it does seem to suffer a little from a 'wall of text' in a few places, and could stand to benefit from some good diagrams or visual aids in parts (the 'Frets' and 'Strings' part could benefit from diagrams for example, possibly one showing both).

It's not the best resource I've seen for learning chords (Garageband's lessons take that title), but as far as websites trying to help you learn, it's better than most I've seen.

This is the place to go if you want good lessons: http://justinguitar.com/en/BC-000-BeginnersCourse.php

He also offers intermediate material: http://justinguitar.com/en/IM-000-IntermediateMethod.php

Seriously, check this out, I haven't seen anything better on the web, free or paid.

Don't think of it as cynicism, it's just my interpretation of what appears to be a mixed message. You and Mahalo have caught a lot of flack for being a content farm, a scraper site, an ad-strewn wasteland, etc, and you've denied those claims, always seeming like your argument was 'Mahalo has good content and we're totally legit'.

Now the message I get is 'we're getting rid of the junk content and focussing on making good, solid pages that will make people stop searching and stick around'.

I suppose my interpretation could be off; I'm not referencing any particular quote of yours, so I may be remembering 'we don't have junk content' as 'we're not spamming our content, whether you think it's junk or not'.

To answer your question, the Mahalo page you linked looks great (and the amount of content is almost overwhelming at first glance). This definitely isn't the Mahalo I remember, and reading your comments here (and what others have said about your comments elsewhere), you don't sound like the Jason Calcanis I've heard so much about. Evil robot twin? Or genuine individual concerned with making good content people want? Only time will tell, but if you're not here to harvest all our organs I'm looking forward to seeing what you have planned.

No, your interpretation isn't off and Jason didn't answer your question.

Keep in mind that the Mahalo audience is very different to HN/tech community.

Is medium quality content, that's easy to find, bad for internet newbs?

I love how this sits right next to "How Organized Spam is Taking Control of Google's Search Results" on the homepage.

You couldn't make it up.

Saw Jason live at DLD talking about "the pivot" it seemed like a genuine change backed up by some very quality video snippets from the new site... much different than his internet persona I had read about in the past. He even apologized to the crowd for "talking too much" when he was younger. A new leaf for sure.

Previously Mahalo was thousands of long tail pages like "How do I make pepperoni pizza at home?". Now it's going to be thousands of long tail videos like "How do I make pepperoni pizza at home?"

That doesn't seem very different to me. Maybe I'm missing something?

Nothing wrong with it as long as it actually intelligibly describes how to make a pepperoni pizza at home.

At least video is harder to scrape from another site or auto-generate, which is where the only real problems are.

But it's "WITH HD videos"... Sigh.

To be fair, it's not like that at all (from what I'm seeing).

Take this page: http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords. Those videos are all (from what I can tell) produced by Mahalo, and are fairly well organized.

Sure, it's a lot of videos, but each is specific to the task at hand. That seems to be a fair example of what they are working toward.

Is pivoting the new synergy?

This is not Jason Calacanis's take on the Google Algorithm Change. This is just Jason Calacanis spamming for his website. He's saying, 'It's funny you mention content spammers—let me tell you some more about the NEW Mahalo!'

If it wasn't for TWiT I'd have never of heard of Mahalo.

My feelings about Jason Calacanis evolved similarly to the way they did about Gary Vaynerchuk, just slower. With Gary, you see him going HiEveryBodyThisIsGaryVay-NER-Chuk!-and-this and you're kind of turned off, but you warm up to him because he's a good guy doing a unique style, and he's got serious chops/substance beneath the style.

Similar for me with Calacanis. It was Peldi from Balsamiq linking to an article of his talking about how to deal with journalists smartly that turned my opinion around, and since then I've come to respect the guy a whole lot. He's got a strong style that rubs people the wrong way at times, but he's a super savvy businessman and also seems like a genuinely helpful person.

The business he actually runs turns off many people more than his personal style.

Agreed. In everything I have read about him it seems perfectly clear that he's happy to game search engine ranking algorithms to place highly in their results. Moreover, driving volume to his site(s) in this way is his main concern.

But unfortunately for the people coming to his sites there really isn't all that much content to see. Perhaps this has changed recently - if so, I'd love to see an example (just one!) of a page on Mahalo which gives better information than Wikipedia (for example)...

Here is a quite lengthy Mahalo GTA4 walkthrough that includes a bunch of videos as well:

http://www.mahalo.com/grand-theft-auto-4-walkthrough/

Here is the GTA4 Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_IV

Note that there appear to have always been "high-content" pages at Mahalo; the complaint was, in addition to the small % of high-content pages, there were also vast numbers of long-tail pages with virtually no content.

With respect, you are comparing apples with oranges. Those two pages are not about the same specific thing.

The specific Mahalo page for GTA 4 is

http://www.mahalo.com/grand-theft-auto-iv/

and it has much less info than the comparable Wikipedia page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_IV

I don't doubt that Mahalo has some detailed pages. However I think these are the exception rather than the norm (and almost certainly created to benefit from particular keyword trends).

Our video game team is amazing.

We are making 900 high-quality videos a week. 105 people at Mahalo now, and we will add 100 more this year. We should be able to hit 3k videos a week this year.

The next wave of videos we create you guys will actually be using.... so I'm looking forward to hearing what people think of our lynda.com-like stuff. :-)

Do you ever think that maybe Mahalo isn't working out and perhaps it is time to give it another go with a different product? It's good to evolve but at some point, throw in the towel. I'd say the same for Seesmic. It's admirable, but at some point after many reinventions, you've just got to step back and examine honestly if you're wasting talent and time on a losing ticket. There's very little about Mahalo that makes it attractive other than the great design. When does anyone say to themselves "Hrm I bet Mahalo has this information" or "I should check Mahalo.com." However if you do plan to stick it out until you're bankrupt you might want to think about employing librarians. Helping resolving information needs is what they are best at.

Well, did you watch my talk about pivoting from DLD? In that talk I outline how Mahalo's human-powered search vision got us to the top 400 sites, but that it wasn't growing and the users wanted more how to/instructional content.

We iterated, and mahalo is a top 200 site that also gets 1M+ views a day on YouTube. yes, 365M views of our 23k videos every year.

I do think your question "i should check Mahalo" is an EXCELLENT one. Human-powered search doesn't have that draw, but I think free instructional videos will.

If you wanted to speak Russian or make perfect grilled cheese or solve a video game you would do well to come to Mahalo.com.

Direct traffic is the real test of a sites worth... and we're very focused on growing that with high-quality instruction.

We have tons of money and tons of revenue... we can't go bankrupt if we can easily make a profit can we? :-)

Talk to me in one year and we'll be in the top 100 sites and have 100M+ views a month on YouTube. :-)

That sounds pretty positive actually. I'm glad that it's working out for you. My impression was looming disaster, I was wrong. :P

Aren't there enough videos of everything you could ever want on youtube already?

Also how does putting videos on pages help with ranking? Does google process video content? :/

1. The quality on Google is really low. People use open microphones, no lighting and there is no real focus on content, curriculum or the credentials of the person speaking. That's what we bring to the table I hope: a great teacher, with a great lesson plan and high-end production (hd, audio, etc).

2. SEO lifts from Video include time spent on page, inbound links and overall value.

How does he "game search engine ranking algorithms"?

Do you still have that link?

Kudos for this pivot, the video is worth watching. Data driven decision making at its finest.

Brilliant!

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