Jason Calacanis Does It Again

Once again, Jason Calacanis has enraged the SEO Community.

His keynote address at SMX Social Media, as reported by Lisa Barone, contained the following statement:

"SEO is a wasted industry. You're wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You're just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won't kick you out. It's a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it."

It didn't take long for the blood to start boiling. It got picked up on Sphinn pretty quickly, with follow-up posts and Sphinn rants not far behind. Wow, is this industry sensitive or what? Here are some thoughts:

Make a Point, Please
If you read though all the posts and comments and replies, you'll find that the most thought out retort anybody has so far is that All Conferences Should Heretofore Ban Jason Calacanis from Speaking, Forever (and Ever). What's notably missing is a coherent argument against  Jason's position. To do this, you'd have to demonstrate that the skills and practices used by SEOs today have a long term value proposition to both clients and search engines alike. You'd have to further predict, convincingly, how search technology will evolve (or won't) and what the future for SEO is in the context of that evolution.

Jason's point is simple, and I agree with it, that current day SEO is largely an act of attempting to influence the (flawed) link-based page rank (and thus relevancy) algorithms in an attempt to achieve higher search engine rankings. As the link-based algorithms go the way of the do-do bird, the basics of SEO will be left behind and these basics will likely not require an entire independent industry to support them. I've had this argument myself with an SEO or two, and have yet to hear a compelling counter position.

Stop Being Suckers
Is it not evidently clear why Jason Calacanis makes statements like these in public forums? Despite their loathsome contempt for Mr. Calacanis, the SEO industry has just created a ton of press for him, his keynote address, and his current endeavor (Mahalo). The best part about all this is watching Jason reply to Sphinn comments, basically egging on the community, and they fall for it every time.  Jane Copland put it best when, on Sphinn, she said:

"There were two or three things he said that were either unfortunately worded or deliberately baity. No one's really paying much attention to anything else he said, but the grand total of about 100 words have made him the story of SMX Social Media. Calacanis wins."

Right now, the SEO Community looks like the rats that Jason the Pied Piper is leading around as he chooses - all for his own amusement and benefit.

Calacanis Wins.

Related Posts: Web Page Spam Definition

Web Page Spam Definition

Just when I'm wondering what to write about next, I see this -

Official - Mahalo is Spam, According to Google's Internal Spam Documents

"Wow," I think, "this is going to be good."

In a number of ways, this post on SEOBook.com is great blog fodder (or link bait, which ever you prefer). Let us count the ways:

#1 Final Notes on Spam
SEOBook.com quotes the leaked Google documents as follows:

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.

What is amazingly ironic about this statement is if you ask the same question about any Google search results page, you will undeniably determine that page to be Spam.

#2 Jason Calacanis Venom
I still don't get why so many people with the letters S, E, and O present and sequential in their job title (bestowed upon them or self-proclaimed) have so much built up anger toward Mr. Calacanis. Well, let me restate that. SEOs don't care for some of what Mr. Calacanis has had to say about them in the past, even though he tried to make ammends at SES NY this year. What I don't get is why everybody is so insecure. Surely these folks are true marketing professionals that have well rounded skill sets they can fall back on as the online link-baiting business slowly starts to fall apart. Right? Surely they're not worried that the true foundations of SEO are really quite simple and one day their clients will wise up and the demand for their sevices will decline dramatically as SEO practices become integrated into standard in-house site building / content creation processes.

#3 What should be indexed, anyway?
By their own definition, Mahalo is a search engine. A curious question, then, is why does Google index the Mahalo pages at all? Search results pages from Yahoo! or Ask.com or MSN aren't indexed by Google, and the favor is graciously returned by each of these sites. So why, then, are the Mahalo pages being indexed? As an alternative search engine, shouldn't they stand alone? As a user, there's marginal value to me if I exectute the Google search, only to be directed to another page full of externally pointing links. Unless, of course, the Google search results page is as relevant as it should be. The same question can be asked for other "aggregator" type sites which function, essentially, as search engines. Think of Shopping.com or PriceGrabber.com, for example - the vast majority of the content on those sites is unoriginal, copied from other sites (merchants or product review synidcation), and provide nothing more than a search function to their users.

Should results page from vertical search engines be indexed by the Big Boys? What about results pages from general "alternative" search engines? This is a tricky proposition that will become more complex as the major Search Engines move more toward becoming destination / content sites themselves.