Big Bucks Blogger

Dear Jason Calacanis,
I read your response to Skrentablog’s criticism that Mahalo will have problems with link rot.¹ The fact is you have a problem with link rot right now on at least one page updated by your team today.

Dead Links / Stale Links on Climate_Change

Let’s look at the links on your search results for “Climate Change” which was edited on August 22 — in other words today.

Because my husband had to take “polar bear defense” training before setting off on an arctic research expedition, I clicked on “‘Don’t discuss polar bears’: memo to scientists” found on Mahalo’s climate change links page.

Clicking lead me to this now dead article.¹

Nestled among banner ads and Google Ads, we find the content. It says “We’re sorry… this story is not currently available”.

By the way, I held up writing this post. That link was already dead a week ago.

How many stale links appear on the very day Mahalo search results are “updated”

I’m not going to click to check every link; that’s what Mahalo’s team should be doing. But anyone who enjoys reading news and issue oriented blog quickly learns which news sites habitually publish stories under temporary links.²

I know your team will find it helpful to learn your freshly reviewed page contains at least four additional dead links. These include:

1. The Latimes editorial: Why the right goes nuclear over global warming” - editorial .
2. A Yahoo news article: “Climate deal talks gain global support” (Published August 3.)
3. Another Yahoo news article: “Blair Using Last Bush Visit to Urge Action on Climate”.
4. Reuters news article: “Singer Sheryl Crow starts global warming tour”.

More dead links than Google.

Google results are sometimes mediocre too, but they are rarely dead. The ‘bot catches the little “We’re sorry… this story is not currently available” messages and gets the articles off their index rather quickly.

Many, including Allen Stern and Peter D at V7N have warned you that Mahalo needs to think ahead on this link rot issue. On your podcast Graywolf warned you that lack of scalability ensured linkrot in Mahalo’s fu ture.

But honestly, the Mahalo link rot is not only your future: Mahalo link rot is now.

Here’s a suggestion from someone who is not a member of the TechCrunch 50,000: Either ask your team to actually look at each web page, or develop an algorithm that recognizes that a page is now dead. Then check your links.

Because those outside the Techcrunch 50,000 prefer search engines that return live links.

Mis-categorized & Missing Important Links.

There are other problems with the page. There is at least one mis-categorized link under “blogs and forums”. (That is, they are miscategorized if one believes all links under “blogs and forums” should point to a blog or forum rather than a Joomla Newsportal.)

Also, I have reason to believe the most relevant, authoritative and, well “best” links are missing. After all, “Real Climate” does not appear on the list of blogs; it should. There is undeniable: “Real Climate” ranks #1 for “climate change” at Technorati, #2 in the Google search for “Climate Change Blog”. With contributors who publish regularly in referred journals on Climate Change, and hundreds of comments per blog post, Real Climate, is arguably the most influential climate change blog in the US.

Are other important links missing? Frankly I don’t know. I strongly suspect they are.

Now Jason, bless your heart. I know you’re trying. I know Mahalo, while released and constantly extolled by you at your blog, is only in Beta. That said, it would be one thing if the humans missing the most important links in a subject was a one time thing.

It’s not a one time thing. As you recall, I criticized your links page for Crochet because it lacks the most authoritative link.

I speculated this happened because the list of links for “crochet” was compiled by people who do not crochet.

I will now be so bold as to repeat advise I have given before: assign the compilation of links to people who are familiar with the subject at hand.

As always Jason, I wish you luck with your endeavor.

Cheers,
Lucia

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Footnotes:
1. Jason Calacanis described his process for preventing link rot as follows:

5. If we have a staff of 100 at Mahalo and those folk update 15 pages a day (i.e. 30 minutes per page) we can do 1,500 updates a day or update the entire 25,000 page index in ~20 days/one month. If we had the public (i.e. Greenhouse help) with the 1,000 folks in the Greenhouse we could update everything in 10-15 days. So, we can handle updating 25,000. 600,000 pages? No…. that would be a problem.

2. For what it’s worth, I probably found all or most the dead links. I clicked all except the ones I was almost certain would remain live (e.g. government agencies, blogs and such.) Certain big daily news services habitually run articles under temporary links and later run the article under a permanent links. Careful bloggers learn how to find the permalink. I found the March 8 article and currently live link by entering the title of the article into Reuters search box; the article is here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Mahalo, SEO, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.