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Source:CenterNetworks

Search engine Mahalo is changing their payment program to their guides beginning this Monday. This is a different - but similar - payment change to the one Gawker implemented last week where they pay bonuses based on pageview traffic. Here’s the update from Mahalo, "Beginning Monday, January 14th, we will be assigning smaller dollar amounts to extremely short SeRPs or very fringe topic SeRPs that aren’t of high priority, and likewise, we will be assigning higher prices to SeRPs in especially difficult verticals or which are in high demand."

Makes sense to do the higher priority pages first, pay more for them and capitalize on the SEO referral traffic while the term is hot. When a story comes out, if Mahalo can get to it first, they might immediately rank 1st in Google based on the timing-changes Google has made. No information was provided on what the actual dollar amounts will change to - we will learn about those next week. Mahalo is also reporting today that they have passed the 25,000 search engine result pages mark. Congrats to the team including Sean Percival!

Let’s take yet another look at the SEO play topic. Anyone remember Jason Calacanis saying "SEO is Shit" at SES Chicago just over a year ago? Anyone remember Jason stating here on CN that "If Google wants to index us well that’s fine with us, but our model is not based on being well indexed in Google or Yahoo." He then further stated his views on SEO here. I still stand firm that a percentage of traffic on Mahalo is actually employee/guide traffic.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is loving the Mahalo noting, "I find Mahalo a good place to start learning about many topics". Today we learn from Hitwise that Mahalo traffic is growing nicely. Hitwise has put together some charts and stats about Mahalo that show a great growth curve. At the end of the post, they note, "Mahalo receives most of its traffic from Search Engines (76% last week)". How could this NOT be a SEO play? If Jason was serious about not being interested in search engine referral traffic, then he could easily block it. Let’s not even touch the internal promotion of articles to the social news sites.

Hats off to the Mahalo team for their early success. I just hope that Jason will admit that Mahalo is a SEO play. Sure in 10 years Mahalo might not need Google/Yahoo to drive traffic, but it’s clear today that they do and are maximizing the pages they create to use Google to their advantage. You see, Google changed some of their rankings so that new posts appear at the top even with no inbound links. Mahalo knows this and so if they continue to create pages for the hot terms, then they will rank well. Of course Jason will say that they are creating the pages because his visitors care about that content, but c’mon, let’s speak like they do on 86th street and Bay Parkway Jason.

And to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a SEO play - Wikipedia’s been doing it for years.

Otis over at Simpy asked for someone to pull some charts from Compete so I did. Here are a few samples of Mahalo’s traffic:

Search for Vanessa Hudgens Photos:

Search for Halo Skulls:

And here is a list of the top 25 search engine keywords that drive traffic to Mahalo:

It’s fine to be an SEO play - just apologize for calling it shit and dead. Come out of the SEO closet Jason, we will all love ya a bit more.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Insights, mahalo, Seo, human search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.