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Calacanis Wants to Ban Affiliate Links; What About Banning Employee Linking?
Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs 2.0 service Mahalo, has apparently left the world of pissing off SEO folk and is now pissing off affiliate folk. This time he wonders if the search engines (including Google, Yahoo and Mahalo) should ban affiliate links from being indexed. First, how would anyone even know it’s an affiliate link? I don’t have a reaction here though if a gun was held to me, I would say that they should be banned or if they are indexed, it should be noted that it’s an affiliate link.
However, after reading Jason’s article about the potential banning of affiliate links it got me wondering about the way Jason links to Mahalo on his blog and the way he pushes his employees to also blog and spread the word of Mahalo.
On calacanis.com, nearly every single post has a link to Mahalo which is competely acceptable seeing as Calacanis is the CEO. But should these links have the nofollow attribute on them? Aren’t they paid links? Sure, there’s no direct payment but seeing as calacanis.com has a pagerank of 6, each time Jason links to a Mahalo page, he is passing the page some very heavy weight. In fact, it’s been reported that 76% of Mahalo’s traffic is coming from Google so naturally this type of linking is helping push Mahalo up the ranks in Google. In my opinion, he should nofollow every one of the Mahalo links.
In fact, employee links might actually be worse than affiliate links as they provide a direct benefit to the company whereas affiliate links only provide a true benefit when the user completes some action.
Furthermore, on the Greenhouse mailing list (that is the list for part-time Mahalo page creators), the executives from Mahalo constantly ask the list to push out the pages to their blogs and their social services. Should these links be labeled? Here is an example of the employee push on Mahalo:
everyone go ahead and share this with Mahalo Share!
http://www.mahalo.com/Grammy_Winners_2008
Mahalo is just one example, this happens across the Web with employees pushing products or services of the companies they are employed by. What do you think? Should employees of sites be able to "push" their sites and pass the juicy search credit or is this just as bad as any other paid link?
This will be my question for him at next week’s SES in NYC.
Yes, Jason is the King of self promotion, and since he stopped talking about anything but Mahalo, I’ve stopped reading his blog. I’ve almost given up on Techcrunch for all the same reasons, it becomes hard to tell whether their recommendations are to promote the next Techcrunch 40 or actually a valuable discussion about new web apps.
I’d like to think that readers will decide for themselves the bias of an article. Jason however has a valid point in his views on SEO Spam and Affiliate Links. Google could identify this content better and if they did it would improve the quality of their results.
Jason Calacanis can eat a whole bag of dicks. He’s a loudmouth moron who pontificates from on high about topics he really doesn’t have a full understanding of. He drastically minimizes portions of his argument so that he can support his thesis. He also doesn’t do any adequate research into his topic before picking an opinion and cherry picking evidence to support it. He’s an alarmist and a twat.
My general policy is not not talk about work on my personal blog, but once, when we had a particularly big product launch, I mentioned it in passing (”been busy, here’s why”) and linked to the site.
Is that “just as bad” as a paid link? I don’t think so, but perhaps I’m not completely objective.
Clacanais isn’t spending his investors’ money smartily. If there purpose is to spread links to Moohulu sites all over, he’d do a lot better hiring cheap labor in Guatamala or Haiti or Vietnam, teach them all how to create and edit blogs and pay them $0.24 per hour if that with no benefits and no latte breaks and fire the Mahululus in Santa Cruz or wherever they are from (I think its Santa Cruz).
The previous poster is right he is a loudmouth moreon and cocksuker who should forget about tech and go into whorehouse running that’s what he’s good at lol. Hah hah.
“The previous poster is right he is a loudmouth moreon and cocksuker who should forget about tech and go into whorehouse running that’s what he’s good at lol. Hah hah.”
Hello Kettle, this is Pot here…
Walking his dog!?! zOMG! How cool!
Also, I’m glad I never went to any internet 1.0 parties. That sounds horrible. Was that in the 90s? The 90s make me barf.
No, I don’t remember his excitement about using the telephone on an airplane. But maybe he should stick to doing shit like that instead of talking about stuff that’s clearly over his head.
Also, the point is moot, because “banning” affiliate links is something a search engine could never effectively do. Maybe they could have back in internet 1.0. But not now.
You must be one of those in his adoring masses, eh?
I’m also guessing you don’t make a living as an affiliate marketer or an SEO. Nah, those people use the web to conduct business and contribute to an actual information economy. Not daydreaming hippie retards like the people in that movie Hackers. You sound old, you probably thought that movie was awesome.
(It wasn’t)
Previous posters –
Jason’s the bomb! He was there walking his dog outside Chelsea Piers and throwing Internet 1.0 parties that ROCKED when you were all still in high school, so shut the fuck up!
Maybe he pontificates ‘a rapido’ from his quick emotional mantra, but heck, do you remember his excitement when he was able to Skype a call from his airplane seat to his, uh….adoring masses at his blog? THAT was the best.
“Now that I’ve found peace at last,
tell me, Jesus, will it last?
- The Blue Nile
I’ll just have to leave it as such.