I don't quite understand the issue, but I think the conflict being , is that because google loves content and backlinks , he had first built a service under the disguise of just being a legitimate human powered search, and can now leverage his network to give credibility to other links for the highest price ? Can anybody else provide more context ?
fast forward the clock a couple years and Jason is operating well outside of Google's guidelines, massively auto-generating scraped content web pages. The auto-generating scraped pages are far worse than anything Squidoo ever did.
Jason publicly claims an ignorance of SEO to act like he doesn't know any better, then inside his corporate sales material the key selling point is SEO.
How can he both be ignorant of SEO and use it as his key selling point?
We are noindexing the pages that have short content and are older than 30 days. If they are less than 30 days old and get more than 50 views we build them out.
That's just a smart strategy, and there is nothing black hat of it.
Also, 90% of our traffic comes from Q&A, walkthroughs and howto articles that are REALLY DEEP in terms of content.
Google has publicly given warnings against search results within search results and scraper content websites.
And time and again you have had scraper pages wind up in the search results against the search engine guidelines with various excuses each time. On those types of pages Google states "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." so no...those are not at all within the guidelines (or even the spirit of the guidelines).
Syndicating content without asking permission and providing no way to opt out and putting nofollow on the links is also a quite dirty business practice.
Keep in mind that scraper sites are not something you learned from me. If someone like me puts up a site like that it is burned almost immediately. Whereas your site has been scraping content for years. (I have never ran any scraper sites, but when Teeceo did what you are doing Matt Cutts described it as "shoot on sight" publicly on his blog)
... but we don't put search results within search results!
We target put 300-500+ original words on each page we index--just like a newspaper or blog.
I know this is highly personally for you, but you don't have to make things up Aaron!
Also:
1. Google is VERY smart about how people can try to game the system and they WILL NOT RANK pages with low content value--you know this!
2. In the small number of cases when a page manager makes a small content page we build it out the SECOND IT GETS OVER 25-50 views.
We WANT TO HAVE high quality pages and we produce a ton of them every day. We DON'T want short pages because google will penalize you for them.
We used to remove this pages from the index with nofollow and that got removed by accident--not that it matters because GOOGLE IS SMART and doesn't rank them anyway.
We are going to have them all noindexed again just so you will move your hate and venom on to someone else..... also because it will help our page rank!
that's the irony of this.... if we don't have these short pages we will DO BETTER! That's why we noindexed them to being with.
So, for that, I thank you for the free SEO of advice.
Also, you will be happy to know that you attention has sent us some more quality writers who want to take part in our revenue sharing content system, as well as a client who wants to work with our Q&A/knowledge platform.
if you were a sales person i would have to pay you a fat commission... instead I'll buy you a dinner and a couple of beers at the next SMX so you can chill out.
seriously dude... chill, life is short! worry about the people in Haiti or the fact that the iPad doesn't have a USB port!
"1. Google is VERY smart about how people can try to game the system and they WILL NOT RANK pages with low content value--you know this!"
If that was actually true then perhaps you would have more full time in-house editorial staff (instead of canning them all). If that was actually true then perhaps I wouldn't see any of your scraped pages ranking in the search results. If that was actually true then you wouldn't be scraping 3rd party content into almost all your pages.
But its not true...and so we are back at the beginning again.
There's a lot of context. The guy who made this site publically called out SEO's as scumbags, then used the dirtiest SEO tricks in the book to make his site rank well. When called out on it, he claims that he doesn't know SEO. Apparently now he's selling his expertise in this area he claims not to know anything about.
I guess to summarize, the only thing he did wrong was to be misleading about his exact knowledge on the topic of SEO. The thing is, you can start a business, and hire expertise. Thats not such a bad thing.
Aaron Wall can keep attacking me for a throw away comment from five years ago (five years!) and ignore the fact that I'm a fan of his as much as he wants.... but I'm not going to get baited into agree with what I said five years ago.
I was wrong about white SEO, I was right about black-hat SEO.
I've given him credit for teaching me the Jedi ways of SEO and for that I'm thankful. Don't be upset because you taught me how to do it well and in a white hat manner Aaron!
And yet when Jason takes your content and wraps it in Mahalo that is somehow legitimate. hmm. double standard, eh?
That is not an area where I taught you anything...it was one you discovered on your own, while analyzing Youtube.
The other thing you mentioned about YouTube was "If YouTube makes $250M from a sale their founders and VCs should give $225M of it back to the content owners like NBC and Loren Michaels who they stole it from!"
And I do hope you hold yourself to your own standards. Though if history is any guide :(
