DMOZ Creator on Mahalo Made-For-Google Search Engine

Rich Skrenta, who founded Topix.net and Open Directory Projec (DMOZ), talks about Mahalo and SEO:

To be fair there have been some notable SEO successes. About.com is probably the biggest seo win ever, with a $410M sale to NY Times in 2005. About has been huge into SEO since they they were known as The Mining Company. About guides got an SEO manual when they joined and were directed to author high-value seo content, as Mahalo is doing with its staff. About now has approx 3-6M pages indexed in Google.

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.