Why We Need to Ignore Jason Calacanis
We've all had this love hate relationship with Jason Calacanis for quite some time. However there's a time to stop giving him attention as Danny points out in From My Inbox: More Defense Of SEO
That's fine. I'll look forward to looking at it. But I'm going to stay as much as possible out of the baiting game that this is some anti-SEO tool. Jason's great at the baiting, but this is one I think the SEO industry as a whole should ignore. Instead, I'll just be interested to see it from a search perspective. Trot it out -- let's see if it is more useful than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask.
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Couldn't agree more. Maybe
Couldn't agree more. Maybe he'll realize that having a conversation with himself isn't as exciting.
I highly doubt everyone will have the will power to refrain from reacting.
It's not that we can't keep
It's not that we can't keep ourselves under control. When someone panders to a prevailing opinion that is incorrect, humanity requires a response.
And that's why it's not a threat. It's snake oil, but this time anti-seo snake oil. There are so many believers out there, someone selling anti-seo snake oil can make a killing. The dead won't be SEOs.
How else could he make it out to be anything else but a copycat wikipedia? He needs to do that for credibility.... he needs a hook. How many people buy Pepsi because it's not coke? Or because there will always be a spot for a #2 most popular carbonated cola?
I'll keep my other opinions of why this is good for seo, to myself.
Well then...
Shouldn't we just ignore this thread and let it and him fade from the pages of TW?
(shit by that logic I shouldn't have even responded to this). Ignoring in 3, 2, 1...
There's no such thing as bad
There's no such thing as bad publicity. This is just more publicity.
then why
i just got done reading a searcharazzi post at SEL that has a huge boner for jason's secret new site. so much for danny's idea of ignoring him now that we've got TW covering it, too.
baiters are the easiest to bait?
..
Ignore who?
Oh ya I vaguely remember now... that no name, know nothing guy.
I always ignore no name, know nothings.
zzzzz
first of all , we have nothing to worry about. I love how Jason claims that date is the end of SEO as we not. Paahhhlease, on the slight chance that it is successful it's going to take him years before he gains any kind of market share in the search industry for us to even notice his site.
Second, lets just Googlebomb some negative press about his startup so many people will come across it.
Second, lets just Googlebomb
Hmmm that's exactly the kind of misguided comment that gives Jason and friends ammunition against the SEO industry. But considering you only created an account at TW to post that, maybe you're just trolling.
Cough
Cough cough
http://www.wolf-howl.com/random-thoughts/michael-gray-and-jason-calacanis-best-friends-forever/
Which is it: Need to Ignore, or Best Friends Forever? :)
Which is it: Need to Ignore,
Depends if there's a link in it ;) (damn we're so easily bought).
Quote: Which is it: Need to
In case you were being serious, you need to read the full blog post and check out one key link to understand the post.
In case you already knew this - well, it still needed to be pointed out for others, otherwise it would like you were being daft, and we can't have that, right ;)
@MattCutts
Wow, I somehow missed that post! LOL
The only justification for that kind of post is that it's a "paid review"?
world's oldest profession
Since we can't actually BUY links anymore - we're reverting to the world's oldest profession to barter for them.
Does it count as a paid link if you pay with your dignity rather than cash? :)
Ooh that was a low blow...
..stuntdubl
But I couldn't have put it better msyelf!
Anyway who is Jason Calacanis???
Anyway who is Jason
I think he won the superbowl in 1973 or something, hasn't done much lately though.
BFF
Matt you want to be my BFF? I still haven't gotten the payment for including you in the paid blog link meme, you want me to put it on your tab?
Although I could always say that did pay me to link you unless you actually sent me the cash, sort of a reverse psychology on paid links ...
He's not the only person we need to ignore
Since when has linkbait ever worked as a mainstream SEO technique? It's all smoke and mirrors I'm afraid and doesn't pay anyone except the SEO "expert" who makes the 400$ an hour piece of linkbait.
A prominent group of self/mutually promoting and bloggers seem to have taken over here at TW and are billing themselves as some kind of SEO masterminds. Many of them offer huge$ a day workshops/retreats, I assume because they cannot make any money off their own sites :))
Since when has linkbait ever
Can't answer your second point but I've used 'linkbait' for many of my clients now. Although I'd been doing that kind of work long before we started calling it that. Almost all has been focused on giving away free content, either PDFs or desktop/mobile applications. That pays off well enough.
Some of the other hooks do seem better suited to blogging/online circles and involve considerably less work! As someone pointed out here, no one is as easy to bait as a baiter.
Since when has linkbait ever
Until you can do it well it is easy to think that, dismissing the value. But some of my overtly commercial sites less than a year old have got national radio coverage and TV facetime due to linkbait (in addition to 10,000+ editorial links).
Feel free to submit more threads if you want to see the coverage change.
Linkbait Bah what's it good for
1.5 million views on your tube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmpnfL5PCw
16,000 free unpaid backlinks in 7 months, from sites like CBSNews.com
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Awillitblend.com+-site%3Awillitblend.com
and a spot on the today show
http://www.willitblend.com/
bah linkbait what's it good for ...
It's also worth noting that
It's also worth noting that linkbait online is still massively undervalued. If you look at the figures paid for offline creative or campaigns, $400/hr sounds laughable.
Thinking about it though the reason I like linkbait is because it is rocket science. Most SEO (as the world still understands it) should have been handed down to web designers years ago.
Just try and find a PR
Just try and find a PR agency to work for $400/hr with the overall output of a good link baiter. With a PR firm, after $15k you'll see a small faction of the success, and an invoice for the next $15k.
The SEO/link baiter could be done after a day or so, except for helping you interpret the analytics, understand why your server crashed, implement data management methods to account for all the linking, and help optimize for conversions.
But that's just what I have seen in my limited experience. I imagine the market could price the service better than I could.
Bah
Yes. This is exactly I mean about propaganda. These measures don't mean much to me. So 1.5 million people people saw it on Youtube. Most of them were most likely my kids and their friends and at least 1/2 of them outside the US where we buy blenders at our local white goods store.
16000 links. Without relevant anchor text it's just a big bunch of pagerank. You can buy that for 500$.
Search google for blender:
http://www.google.com/search?q=blender&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enBG177BG215
not in top 50. Hopefully someone following those links will buy a blender then, because they are not doing much for the SERPs.
Free spot on the TV, now that is worth something :)
Blender
yes but 1-8 on that page are software, 9 is blendtech who makes the "will it blend" blender and #10 is more software
Uh, I'll keep taking those
Uh, I'll keep taking those 16,000 high quality editorial links to build global domain trust.
Every. Fucking. Time.
I'm not against link bait
I'm just saying that there are many ways to skin a cat and link bait is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut unless we are talking "large customer" and it's being touted on TW a lot without any competition, mainly because blackhats are keeping their mouths shut for obvious reasons.
If someone wants to be #1 for blender there are much easier ways, and quicker too ;)
If someone wants to be #1
If you want to call everything else crap feel free to contribute something more useful.
>>call everything else crap
Not exactly. We all know what works in Google, right?
Trust and links. Nobody who knows where to get a million links or mega trust for his domain is going to spoon feed that to a forum and give away a trade secret (not only to the competition but also to Google's engineers) unless he's about to retire. That's the catch 22 with forums. Lots of general info but the specifics are very thin on the ground.
http://www.jimboykin.com/link
http://www.jimboykin.com/link-bait-alone-wont-do-it-you-need-link-ninjas/
I tend to agree with Jim here. Link bait you are not in control of the anchor. Give away something for free you can usually control the anchor.
With link bait you get people linking with something like (graywolf said) (I saw this) (check out this bozo) etc etc. It is good for trust but you need the anchor to finish it off.
Todays news is tomorrow chip paper for the buzz element but backlinks with anchor are a lot longer lasting and a lot better roi IMO.
obscurity coming?
For some it seems that reputation matters for nothing nor credibility but more than anything the JC L/B is just embarrassing, the question is whether it is sutainable as a means to serve its purpose.
For best results one would imagine there is a certain need for some credibility rather than just sensationalism or surely time will deliver obscurity whatever is released when there is an association with the same provider.
Jason is the link bait expert
Agree completely with Danny and GrayWolf ... let it die quietly. Jason is better at linkbaiting than most SEOs, and he's not using Digg. He's creating a quite a bone of contention, which in turn is creating links. Then, he continues to dispute the value of seo to gain even more notoriety. We should all be so smart! Does he offer courses?
I could care less about JC
but nice to see some new voices moving out of the "lurker" stage and into the "poster" stage Jeff and Galway.
lurking
:)
have lurked here but been active elsewhere.