My response to the wonderful SEO @aaronwall who's been giving us great, free advice!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Calacanis
Date: Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 10:11 AM
Subject: Thanks again Aaron!
To: aaron@

Aaron,

We're taking a bunch of your advice and refining our SEO over the coming weeks. 

1. The pages that are short content we're going to noindex after seven days of inactivity and delete them after some period and warnings to users. we don't have any interest in breaking any rules or even doing anything border line.... 90% of our traffic comes from the big content pages (how to, Q&A and walkthroughs) so there is no upside in these in progress/stub/whatever pages. Do you think is a good plan?

2. WRT to the "scraping" advice we are using Google, Bing, etc APIs to pull in their searches and refreshing them as the pages get traffic. Not sure what the issue is because our design takes shorter abstracts than Google/Bing/etc! 

3. Do you think we should remove nofollow from our links? we added this to avoid the problem of SEOs coming in and turning Mahalo into a link farm... this has worked really well IMO. We've seen discussions on message boards where folks say "don't bother trying to use Mahalo for building links." 

Anyway, thanks for keep us on our toes and we look forward to more great (free!) advice from you and your team. Our team had dinner in Korea Town last night during our quarterly "codejam" and they were all raving about your advice and brainstorming over it for an hour! We really do appreciate you spending so much time on our site, design and model. 

Our new goal, now that we've reached the top 200 sites in the United States, is to:

a) be the largest content site in the United States (bigger than even Wikipedia and About.com!)

b) be the largest and most efficient Q&A site in the United States (yes, even bigger than Yahoo Answers so day)

c) be the best provider of comprehensive search results in the United States (note: comprehensive search to us is five or more search APIs on a page including things like links, news, blogs, twitter, products, books, images, videos, facebook, ebay, etc). 

Without the critical eye of experts like yourself we'll never get there.... and for that we're thankful!

Where are you based? Would really love for you to come by Mahalo and have lunch with the team and continue the discussion of how we can do better--and even how we can use your SEO techniques to grow! Additionally, would love to have you on This Week in Startups. 

all the best, j
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Jason McCabe Calacanis
CEO, http://www.Mahalo.com
Office: 310-593-6134 / Mobile: 310-456-4900
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