Where is Jason Calacanis's Disclosure, to People AND Machines?
After yet another episode of Jason jumping up and down for the world to notice him and his company (this time with some affiliate marketer rants and techmeme coverage), a Feb 29 post by Allen Stern over at Center Networks focused on Jason's conflicted, undisclosed PageRank-passing link practices and his promotion of such practices to the rest of his employees. Jason's practices were particularly ironic given he just highlighted the FTC quote: "We wanted to make clear . . . if you're being paid, you should disclose that."
You can read Allen's direct affiliate, employee, paid link comparisons. My post just provides a bit more detail to Allen's dead-on observation. My post isn't about affiliate links. My post isn't about buzz marketing. My post isn't about Mahalo's business model (human scraping is worthy of a whole other post). It's simply about applying Google's standard for machine-readable disclosure to Jason's PageRank-passing links. In fact, it's even more narrow than all of Jason's violations (Andy Beard covers some others) -- I'll just focus on his deliberate PageRank juicing of Mahalo already alluded to by Allen. No rocket science here.
Google's standard:
1) Google's position on disclosure, via Matt Cutts, is that adequate disclosure on the web must be understood by people AND understood by machines. [next 3 images are directly from Cutts presentation]



4) Jason Calacanis gets paid direct cash compensation from Mahalo, and significant equity compensation from Mahalo as a shareholder. [next 3 images are directly from calacanis.com posts]




8) Jason's undisclosed PageRank-passing links are working. Pages that no one has found interesting enough to link, reach Google #1 SERPs because of Jason's single PR6 keyword-stuffed link. See this Google SERP and this backlink check as just one example of many.
9) Neither the linker (Calacanis.com, PR6) nor his sponsor (Mahalo.com, PR6), have received any penalties as a result of these clear Google Guideline violations. There are times when I've heard Google say they focus on the most egregious examples, but I can't think of a blogger with more compensation at stake, doing more blatant, conflicted PageRank-passing without machine-readable disclosure.
Google, what are Allen and I missing?
Labels: allen stern, calacanis.com, center networks, disclosure, google, jason calacanis, machine-readable disclosure, mahalo, matt cutts, paid links
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