Ok so Jason Calacanis is talking smack about bad SEO’s again and I think it’s time to clear the air. First of all if you want to talk to SEO’s and good one’s go to an SEO conference not a web 2.0 conference. I don’t know who spoke there and really don’t care, but if you want the best advice go to the best conference you can. I’d especially recommend Pubcon or any of the SMX series. Want to see some really helpful sessions try sitting in on a site audit session you’ll really get a much better understanding of what people in the real world have to go through. Now to prove my point I’ll do a little mini review of Mahalo for you, free of charge no $199.95 or call me later at the office tricks …
Technical Issues
You have a canonical problem, what this means is http://www.mahalo.com and http://mahalo.com both work. What you need to do is choose one or the other and 301 redirect the other so you don’t get hit with a duplicate content penalty. Yes search engines should be smart enough to figure it out, but they aren’t.
You aren’t serving 404 pages properly for example http://www.mahalo.com/This-page_doesnt-exist/ gives you a 200 response code see for yourself. You’ve got a bit of a hack going adding this meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” /> but that’s really not the best/right way to do it.
Your robots.txt file http://www.mahalo.com/robots.txt blocks /docs sub directory however that’s actually a real page you probably want indexed http://www.mahalo.com/Docs
There are some pages that should be blocked in your robots.txt file that aren’t like http://www.mahalo.com/Special:userlogin?returnto=Bin/ again you have the meta tags in place but as Matt Cutts of Google has shown each search engines handles things a little bit differently, so you need to use things in the right combination.
Your homepage has duplicate content http://www.mahalo.com/Main_Page and http://www.mahalo.com/ have the exact same content but are different URL’s.
Internal Linking
You aren’t maximizing your internal anchor text for example on your homepage you have “more” twice
Try to use words that actually describe what’s on the following page. It’s a bit of a usability function as well, in fact even the W3C recommends doing it
You could also speed up getting new pages in the index if you featured more than one like you are doing now on your homepage (see dinosaur comics from screen shot above).
You could also do a better job of blocking pages from the index that don’t really need to be in the index. For example your TOS and Privacy Policy should be nofollowed and blocked via robots.txt, again see an interview with Google’s Matt Cutts.
Your “stubs” may not be the best content, so it might not be worth making it easy to index with a bot followable link
Remove the superfluous non KW rich words from your internal anchor text
On Page Factors
You’ve got some javascript up at the top, it’s not an obscene amount, but I’d try to move it to an external file if possible.
Your layout isn’t overly complex you could easily adapt it to get the content before the header using CSS. That’s something called keyword prominence. It’s kinda hard to make the claim that you aren’t interested in SEO when this is a comment on your page <!– Main Content for serps ***********************–>
What’s with the inline CSS styling like this <h1 style=”border-bottom: none;font-weight:bold;margin-bottom:.4em;”> or empty tags like this <div style=’position:absolute; top:.6em; left:0;margin-left:-1em’><div class=’guide_note_sprite’></div></div> that’s what we call code bloat and easily fixed.
You’re using <i> and <b> tags again not horrible but they are deprecated tags <em> and <strong> should really be used especially when you are using this doctype like you are <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd“>
Your links are formatted like this
<a href=”http://www.nypost.com/seven/04252007/tv/dream_teen_tv_linda_stasi.htm” class=”external text” title=”http://www.nypost.com/seven/04252007/tv/dream_teen_tv_linda_stasi.htm“> you are pumping the destination URL into the title attribute, which was really meant for improved accesability and should contain natural language not URL’s.
You images use really poor alt text. Most of them are blank the few that aren’t have “warning” messages. In addition to improving accessibility it can also help a little with internal anchor text. Don’t think it’s important, Target is getting dragged into court because of it.
Page Structure
Looking at your page layout you are “wasting” a lot of your prime real estate, for example you have the Google Ads buried in the lower right, move them up to the top right where the guide note section is now.
You’re a new site and you want to work the social media angle as much as possible, so I’d move the bookmarks up too. You could also maximize your screen real estate by adding the “email this page” into that box as well. I’d also put that combination box at the bottom of every article instead of just the “email this page” again.
The login info can be made much smaller and go above the logo on the right.
You list some names in related searches that aren’t clickable, bad for usability, as it teases your users
Since your pages are DB driven it really wouldn’t be that hard to serve them up in RSS format. This way people could subscribe to them individually and instantly be notified of changes. It’s a killer way to bring new traffic, trust me …
You need the ability to isolate the HTML title, URL structure and H1 tag into different elements for example this page is a mess http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_make_flawless_pie_crust_%28it%27s_easier_than_you_think%29
for example the HTML title should be: How to a Make Flawless Pie Crust – Mahalo
URL: http://www.mahalo.com/How_to_make pie_crusts
H1: How to Make Flawless Pie Crusts (It’s Easier Than You Think)
The HTML title is focused, the URL is cleaner (and has a plural), the page title is still interesting (and helps with the plural).
Try for some uniformity in picture sizing it just makes for a more professional looking article. 
Also when I click on a picture I should get a really big version not a rinky dink one like this.
Link Building
Everybody needs more external links to deep pages, you need more because you are new. I bet a lot of your green house people run blogs. Why not build a widget that lists the pages they worked on. Have it hard link to your home page and their profile page (which needs to be changed to be crawlable). The widget should show their “rank” cause people dig that.
Stroke the egos of the linkerati, set up pages for every A-List blogger and some B-Listers, people with podcasts, or popular YouTube Channels. Let them know about it, set them up with a login and invite them to correct any errors or add things. Oh and for heavens sake clean up bad/awkward grammar like “Jeffrey Zeldman is a much-respected web designer” on this page. There shouldn’t be anyone in the technorati top 100 like Go fug yourself who isn’t in Mahalo.
Get some shirts made, get them in startup schwag hold a photo contest on flickr of people wearing your shirts in cool places. Get some laptop stickers working, enter everybody who posts a picture of it on their laptop into a contest for something cool.
Do something really outrageous and viral like set up a Mahalo dunk tank with you in it at an SEO conference, charge like $10 to throw and donate the money to charity, just think of the link love …
This list is by no means exhaustive or all encompassing, but almost all of these are pretty easy things to fix. These are the kind of things an SEO should be telling you and helping you with, and if they aren’t you aren’t talking with the right people.
Why did I spend the time writing this? I know you’re a smart guy, and just because you happen to have run into some sleazy SEO’s in the past doesn’t mean we are all bad. We’re no different than any other profession, there are good people and bad people, but it’s unfair to critcize an entire industry just because of a few bad apples. I also would like to think that you’re a big enough person to realize when you’ve made a mistake, and aren’t afraid to admit it.
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Wow, Greywolf, that was very good and incredibly nice of you. You are giving SEO’s a good name.
Kudos to you!
Ahem. There should be no apostrophe in SEOs or ones or URLs.
http://www.apostrophe.fsnet.co.uk/
An additional question. Why does the /docs folder redirect to /Docs folder (change of case)?
The robots.txt blocks the lower case version, not the upper case one.
Reminds me of the neil patel blog critique earlier this year with the same unrepentent subject.
Good work, Michael, but at some point you got to cut your losses…
A good review, Michael. Though I doubt Jason will fully appreciate it. I don’t remember him fully appreciating Neil’s efforts that got him handsome traffic earlier.
The key to understanding the work of an SEO, is to see it in person. Your suggestion that Jason attend a site audit session (completed by a competent SEO) is more important than attending the best conference possible.
You just schooled him… very classy.
You may just win the longest URL ever contest as well.
Very imformative post. I hope the owner of that site appreciates the effort. Great job.
Yes Michael this was a great post, however TomG I highly doubt that Jason (mahaolo.com) will truly appreciate the article.
typo in the above post, should be mahalo.com
Wow, Thats a nice post. I am sure Jason will recognize it and He is smart enough to take all of your inputs too. It not that,this post is about just SEO, It is also about Usability. Good job. Posts like this will help Jason and other that not all SEO’s are Bad. Keep up the good work
Suresh
Goes to show that if you stir up controversy and step on a few toes you can get thousands of dollars in free promotion and assitance.
How much would this site review cost for my site? I could compare the amount of money it would take to get to a conference and hope I can get my site in front of a review panel, or I can talk shit on SEO’s until someone (or two) call me out and do it for free.
But, thanks Michael for providing some tips I can use, as always.
It’s a great post ! Mr Calacanis has received the lesson he deserved. In ignorance of what he was talking about, Mr Calacanis should have stayed quiet. Excellent !
Yuri – Maybe he didn’t appreciate Neil’s efforts, but it doesn’t matter. Neil got a ton of free press and links from his challenge to Jason. That, as I remember it, was Mr. Patel’s breakthrough to the big leagues of SEOs.
Nice writeup Gray Wolf. Didn’t they raise like $100 million VC? Such a waste of cash, paying for all that content if it’s not well optimized.
“For example your TOS and Privacy Policy should be nofollowed and blocked via robots.txt…”
Just to be clear, I said that if you wanted to send less PageRank to TOS/Privacy Policy/Sign In/Copyright-type pages (or avoid crawling such pages altogether), nofollow was a perfectly fine tool to achieve that. It’s up to each webmaster whether they want such pages crawled/indexed.
If you want to link to your TOS on every page, that’s completely fine–it just might not be the 100% optimal use of internal link structure.
@matt cutts yea my wording was a bit awkward, my bad, wasn’t trying to put words in your mouth.
This is a great report and it is a shame that Jason gets it for free. If all SEO ‘experts’ had the same straight forward approach to writing an SEO report and charged a reasonable amount for it, no one would listen to the Calacanis Banter. The sad truth is that the SEO community has not policed it’s own and called out all of the overcharging over hyped bad SEO firms that exist. Until you get rid of Witchdoctors chanting Hocus Pocus and snake oil salesmen the entire industry can be called into question.
Michael, feel free to take a look at votelicio.us and let me know what you think. I think SEOs are great, and that was an amazing post.
Lol, amazing. Michael writes about SEO for the second time this year. For a while there, I wondered if Michael actually knew any SEO.
Good review, but seriously, SEOs usually talk more about paid links and Google being evil than SEO. So I’m really not surprised Jason got the wrong idea.
Great analysis Michael. This post is in the “if you’re going to read one post on SEO…” category.
Michael – Amazing!! Curious how Calacanis responds to this…:)
Nice post Michael. Entertaining and gives a good look at a basic SEO review. As always, I’m wondering where the metrics are (if you do this you get that) because I see that as the core problem. Even with the seemingly good advice, he can just say it won’t matter much.
Will it matter, Michael? Does he have symptoms of a canonicalization problem? Are people already linking to http://mahalo.com/Interest_rates and http://mahalo.com/interest_rates and http://mahalo.com/Interest_Rates instead of
http://mahalo.com/Interest_rates ? Or maybe the mortgage page at http://mahalo.com/Mortgages . If no one links directly to http://mahalo.com/mortgages or http://www.mahalo.com/Mortgages , will his misconfiguration really matter?
I’m all for educating the public on SEO, but maybe the best way would be to simply beat them to the top spots and let them decide for themselves that they need better SEO.
oops… looks like Wordpress included the period and commas in those URLs.
Excellent audit, Sir. Very nicely done. And you didn’t get all of it, of course, which isn’t possible anyway without kicking it around for a couple of days. If in fact the gentleman concerned makes himself out to be knowledgeable in this field (which I don’t know since I don’t know him), you rather put the mockers on that by clearly showing his technical knowledge to be somewhere between 0 and 10%. On the other hand, I thought some of his comments about the SEO advice given were reasonable, though I believe misguided, and certainly overstated.
I have to admit some guilt in that line myself, with regard to not giving out free advanced advice. Why would you? You can help people a bit, but at the end of the day you don’t go into court on a murder charge and defend yourself – you hire the best professional you can afford. You don’t try to present your website optimally yourself, in a tough commercial market, because you wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell – you hire the best pro you can get.
Has anyone thought about perhaps Jason is doing this for the exposure? Seriously? I’m amazed how many people are up in arms over his comments and then drive his exposure through the roof.
Michael,
While you did not have to do it, it was very noble of you to do step forward. I am wondering who else had the guts to do something like this? It certainly proves that not ALL SEOs are bad. I hope the SEO community will come together and agree on a certification process so that not every sleazeball out there can ruin it for people like Michael and many other professional SEOs.
I suspect Jason, now, will have reason to bitch even more so can get more.
Lol. Go Michael, and John Andrews for that matter!! Right on his forehead!
Great post – sets the record straight and has very useful info for anyone reading it! Although I am not sure Jason cares about optmizing his site since he things SEO is a load of bull. Also it seems to me that Mahalo seems strangly familiar to me – can you say MiningCo now About.com?
I can’t believe you gave this douche more free advice.
Good critique. I suppose it is nice of you to give Jason an idea of what a real SEO expert does, but I am sure there are more open minded people out there who would love to have you critique their sites.
Amen about Pubcon….see you next week.
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