Breaking News: Calacanis Still Clueless

I was really trying hard not to blog about this, but I just can’t help myself. For those of you who haven’t heard, Neil Patel (SEO expert) recently challenged Jason Calacanis (some guy who’s popular for some reason) to an SEO challenge where he claimed he could increase Jason’s SE traffic by 10-20%:

So to you Jason, I offer the following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect. I will NOT be doing anything “shady” or unethical and will even point out all the changes that will be made to your blog. You can even have your own designer/programmer make the changes to your blog; I will even layout everything for them using step-by-step instructions.

Neil has already won the challenge which he posted about Monday and updated today with the exact strategies he used. Here’s the techniques (10% of total changes according to Neil) that he posted:

Post titles where: The Jason Calacanis Weblog – [Name of post entry]
New Post titles: [Name of post entry]

Meta description tags before were blank and contained nothing.
New meta description: [First 20 or so words from the post]

Wow, rocket science right? These couple of changes, according to Neil, resulted in a 21% increase in SE traffic to Jason’s blog. He also argues that the increase would be much more significant if Jason hadn’t had bloated numbers toward the beginning of the challenge due to a post about the Oscars or something. But Jason, of course, disregards most of these results attributing them to other factors. That’s not really the point of this post, however.

So why the hell am I ranting about all this?

People Have No Clue About SEO

Jason is a really popular blogger. I personally don’t enjoy his writing – it comes across as completely frivolous to me – but many people do. You would think one of the top bloggers on the net would understand the purpose and practice of SEO. I mean for the love of god, how does someone become an “A-lister” without knowing how to use proper title tags?

Yet his ignorance still did not stop him from calling the practice of SEO complete bullshit. How does someone who knows little to nothing about a subject disregard it absolutely and without exception? Jason embodies the common opinion of SEO on the internet. People think it’s spam.

How is setting up your title tag to display the most SE relevant text first spam? How is creating proper meta description spam? How is pursuing inbound links on related sites using keyword-targeted anchor text spam? It isn’t. So is all SEO good? Hell no. There’s plenty of SEO spam out there – but we have a word for it. It’s called Black Hat.

Is “Black Hat” an arbitrary qualifier to justify the use of SEO? I don’t think so, though others may argue. White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO are two extremely different things in my mind, and that is something that Jason and people with similar mindsets need to remember.

White Hat is optimizing your website and its content in a way that makes it most receptive to search engine crawlers.
Black Hat is attempting to attain a higher ranking in a search engine by tricking or confusing the search engine – ie. keyword stuffing and similar practices.

SEO As a Short-Term Solution

I constantly hear people (including Jason of course) claim that SEO is a short-term solution to the traffic question. Jason even compares his little spike in SEO traffic to a hit of crack. This just shows his ignorance.

All of these changes Neil makes would have cost me $10-20,000 in consulting fees with an SEO firm from what I understand (correct me here if I am wrong), and these kind of changes do NOTHING for the reputation of you site. They get you a quick, free hit of traffic.

There’s a couple things wrong with this statement. First off, I assume he is referring to the $10-20,000 number to describe all of the changes Neil is doing, but assuming that he’s already done 10% already, we’re talking $1-2,000 just to change title and meta tags. If that is the going rate for 5 minutes of SEO work, I need to start pushing myself as a consultant. Secondly, he claims that SEO gets you a “quick, free hit of traffic”. That’s dumb.

To begin with you cannot group all SEO traffic into one huge bracket labeled “google[organic]” and make any overarching claims about it. There are different kinds of SE traffic. If you are referring to popular terms such as “pirates of the caribbean 3″ then you probably will get a huge jump of temporary traffic if you manage to rank for that term when the movie is released. If you’re talking about “hdmi cables” then that is going to be a worthwhile term for at the very least the next 5-10 years. You can even get more stable and target a keyword like “coffee tables” which will never (in the forseeable future) let up in search traffic. There is never going to be a day when the world wakes up and decides coffee tables are unnecessary. In that sense, search engine traffic is a very stable source of visitors.

For anyone to claim that search engine traffic is always spike traffic is ridiculous. Digg is spike traffic. Stumble is spike traffic. Slashdot is spike traffic. Search engine traffic is (often) not spike traffic. There are of course exceptions to this rule, but if Jason wants to speak in generalities then so can I!

Conclusion

I’m sorry for this long rant of a post. This is the main reason why I didn’t want to blog about this topic. It’s a battle that will never end – there will always be people out there saying that SEO is worthless and then there will be the people who see it work daily. In the end, SEO will not work alone. Jason argues that content rules over SEO, but the way I see it they go hand in hand. If you have amazing content it may often be overlooked if it isn’t properly optimized for search engines. On the other hand you can SEO the hell out of a lame article, but it will still be lame when you’re done.

Three life lessons I’ve learned through all of this:

1) Work on content.
2) Work on SEO.
3) Ignore Jason Calacanis.