by merrick on August 29, 2007
The search revolution is coming says Robert Scoble, and Mahalo is going to lead it?
No we did not get punked. Ashton Kutcher does not pop out in the background. Robert genuinely believes Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook will be how we search in the future replacing Google and crawler based search engines as our primary search tool. Yeah the search industry will evolve, the Internet’s not boring or dead but so what if Robert has an opinion on where search is going?
Well in his video series Scoble uses the SEO industry to persuade his audience that Google is broken fundamentally and Mahalo is better. Scoble makes at least 10 mistakes he later owns up to, but actions speak louder than words. Robert Scoble is just another blogger that thinks SEO = spam.
Danny outlines why Scoble is misinformed and later tells him to fuck off. Somehow I always thought Calcanis would be the first to hear those words coming out of Danny’s mouth.
I read too many feeds as it is, and to hear one more blogger piss on the search industry that works hand in hand with Google, Yahoo, and MSN would be a mistake. I don’t have 600 feeds in my Google Reader account anymore, I just unsubscribed from one, two feeds.
For any startups out there that have user generated content, don’t be fooled into thinking SEO is spam. Companies like Topix.com credit a lot of their growth to SEO, and so have others.
by merrick on August 26, 2007
by merrick on August 22, 2007
After getting back to the hotel from the Google Dance, I turned on the nofollow highlighting feature of search status extension for Firefox. After the paid links debate yesterday at Search Engine Strategies I figured I should be seeing nofollow links to see how they are being used in practice.
Today when I visited Hacker News, formerly Startup News, from Y Combinator I saw the page contains nofollow links to selective stories. I included a screen capture below of Hacker News that includes nofollow links in a pink box with a red outline. My first thought was that this is one way Paul Graham is trying to prevent spam submissions, but I wondered why some links have are trusted and others are not.
Some sites like valleywag.com are represented on the list with a regular link (#10 on the screen capture below), and then a nofollow link (#11 on the image below). If you look at link #13 it has a nofollow on it, and it is to the nytimes.com site. This was a submission by Paul Graham about the Sky feature on Google Earth, if you cannot trust yourself (pg) who can you trust?
From what I can tell, links submitted to Hacker News are nofollow until they reach a threshold of up votes (points), possibly 5. This is one interesting way of trying to keep spam submissions out. Some people long ago figured out that even if you submit a story that does not become popular to sites like digg.com you can get a back link to your site.
