rich skrenta, founder of dmoz.org and co-founder and ceo of topix.net, has some advice for jason and his human-powered search engine, mahalo.

We know this from experience: No one will ever go to Mahalo directly, just as no one ever went to About.com, dmoz, Tripadvisor, Nextag, IMDB or any other vertical or broad-but-shallow site. Google is where everyone starts and Mahalo’s distribution strategy has to be SEO. Its traffic is going to live or die based on SEO skill and Google’s continued favor.

given how passionately jason hates anything and everything that has to do with seo, that’s gotta hurt. here’s the response:

From where we sit we think that we can make a great service that is not driven by SEO. If we rank high because some of our pages are one of the BEST pages for a keyword on the internet we are honored to be considered. However, it’s not our focus. Our focus is on building the best pages and we think that we can capture a significant audience who will either come to Mahalo first, or side by side, Google/Yahoo/Ask.

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