when Google decides to apply it's rules.

Mahalo is a black hat SEO site, that's given preferential treatment by Google. Any other black hat SEO site would have gotten delisted a month after launching.

Jason Calacanis is a guy who runs a sweatshop building a website you've probably never been to and never will because you're a smart person who doesn't fall for spam.

He also has made a career out of being a professional asshole and making fun of "lifestyle businesses" that make products that people like and pay for. He thinks that if you're not a workaholic and want to enjoy your short time here on Earth then you shouldn't be working with startups.

0. The zeroth rule of SEO is get your site listed for a search for your site. If your site is bobsfishingtips.com, make sure if someone searches for Bob's Fishing Tips, you get found. This means simply getting at least one real site to link the name of your site to you, or maybe a couple sites if you have some common word like Yelp.

1. After that, make sure people link to you with proper anchor text for other keywords. If you want people to search for "fishing tips" and find you, then several people will need to link you something like this:

    This site has great <a href=http://www.mysite.com>fishing tips</a>.

2. The more authority these links have, the better you will do. If you get a very high PageRank site to link "fishing tips" to you, you might be immediately first for that query in Google. Or, 2-3 medium links might do it.

3. The words you want people to search for need to be used several times on your site. You should have the words "fishing tips" on several pages and you should link to your best page on "fishing tips" by putting that phrase in your own links to your own pages.

4. Also make sure you put the keywords you want searches for in the title of your page, and enclose them in H1 tags or other bold/header tags. This won't help very much, but it's probably worth doing.

5. Links don't really help you unless they are from a real domain - a link from someblog.blogspot.com will not help your PageRank much at all. Also, the domain needs to exist for a while to help you - something like a year.

6. Good places to get links are from your college and high school newspapers, local newspapers, and anyone else who has a website that would appropriately cover you.

7. Some sites have way more PageRank than you might expect. www.cmu.edu is an anchor site for the link graph, and a link from this site will do wonders for your PageRank.

8. Here are some excellent pages on SEO:

    http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/
    
    http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-two/

You should also check out Mahalo.com. That site is SEOed within an inch of its existence on Google, so take some tips from them but tread carefully.

9. In the end, it really boils down to having authoritative links with the right anchor text linking to you. The rest matters very little.

This also means a lot more games will be developed with OpenGL rather than just DirectX, which might bring many more future games to Linux as well.

We're hackers not journalists. If he feels Calacanis is scum he should be free to say so and not be held to some arbitrary standard of wiki-objectivity. It's certainly a lot more truthy than most of the horseshit that Calacanis drops around here whenever the subject of Mahalo comes up.

When will we stop hearing about Calacanis and Mahalo? The only thing I take away from the whole thing is how effective manipulating search engines can be. And I already knew this. From blackhat SEOs.

The only thing the blackhats haven't taught me is how to get into the Google index and stay there - how are you doing it, Calacanis?