my thank you email to @aaronwall for the free SEO advice: great SEO, great guy!

Aaron's a great SEO and he's been giving me free advice for years... really instrumental in helping Mahalo grow! If you are in the need of SEO talent i suggest http://www.wolf-howl.com/ and www.seobook.com!!! 

best j

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Calacanis <jason@calacanis.com>
Date: Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:41 AM
Subject: thanks!
To: aaron wall 

thanks for the long post... it's an important discussion. 

while you did point out that we have these stub pages like wikipedia, the fact is they are < 1% of our traffic and .1% of our revenue. We used to no-index them and we accidentally took that off when we moved to Mahalo 3.0 i think. 

it actually HURTS us to have these pages I'm told by multiple SEOs of note because they are not original content and google doesn't rank them AND they spread our page rank. 

from what i'm told we're better off building more of our how to pages, walkthroughs and Q&A pages. those are getting us 90%+ of our traffic and revenue.

can you confirm this is a better strategy? i do respect your thoughts on SEO... even though i really don't understand SEO that well. 

in fact, the only thing i'm really good at is finding great writers and building a brand. if you search for "VIDEO GAME walkthrough" you'll find we're second only to IGN in 30 short months because our pages are better. same thing with how to articles... we're better than ehow and only second to them in ranking. 

any other tips you can give us? really appreciate it pal!

i guess SEO is not BS!!! :-)

best j

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