Calacanis Wants to Ban Affiliate Links; What About Banning Employee Linking?

CenterNetworks' Allen Stern writes Calacanis Wants to Ban Affiliate Links; What About Banning Employee Linking? "Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs 2.0 service Mahalo, has apparently left the world of pissing off SEO folk and is now pissing off affiliate folk. This time he wonders if the search engines (including Google, Yahoo and Mahalo) should ban affiliate links from being indexed."

Love him or hate him, one thing Jason will do is self promote. To me it reaches the extent of spamming. Its one thing to promote within your own blog or your own company, but having teams of employees actively posting links on social sites just to increase your traffic, page ranks or placement is no different than everything Jason says he's against.

Mahalo constantly asks employees, either part time guides or in house staff to push out the pages to their blogs and their social services. Once the social side of Mahalo was created Jason even sent out mass emails to everyone on Mahalo telling them to make sure to add his profile. And a big push was made for everyone to add all their profiles (MySpace, Flickr, Twitter ect), friends and any Mahalo employees they could so as to create a bigger web ring.

Some day Jason is going to have to give up his double standard and call Mahalo what it is. An SEO or SEM play. All you have to do is look at the page structure for so called "search engine result pages (SERPs)". Everything about the way pages are structured and created is directly geared towards optimization.

Now days they push more towards creating "stubs", optimized pages with 5-10 of the hottest links from Google, about the hottest trends. Maybe someone can tell me how these pages differ from Splogs. Scraping content and links from Google, chasing hot topics and Google Trends, if thats not Splogging I don't know what is.