SEO Case Study - Mahalo.com

I am taking Mahalo.com (Yes, the link is nofollow) which is marketed as first human power search engine, as the first SEO Case study in the blog. From now on, in about every 2 weeks or so, I will try to cover 1 big website which get tons of organic traffic thanks to heavy SEO.

I strongly believes in learning by example and I am sure these case studies should help people to “see” things which is not possible with lists or ebooks. Also when you “see”, you have better retention over reading (which you forget easily).

So Here is our First SEO Case Study - Mahalo.com

First thing first, We will not talk about the problems with Mahalo.com (it can take some real long time) or why its disliked so much in web space (I am myself not a fan of it either) here so lets just get straight to the point …

Mahalo.com was launched in the summer of 2007 by Jason Calcanis and since then has got huge traction thanks to tons of money pour into the site by Jason. If you have never heard of the site or are not sure what the site is about, Mahalo.com is managed by content editors who create pages on information which people often look for.

Mahalo has more than 200k pages indexed in google right now with alexa rank of around 1500 which is pretty good for a 1.5 year old website. The interesting thing to note is, unlike wikipedia, more than 98% of Mahalo pages have very little (I will go ahead and say zero) backlinks. Still almost every page of theirs rank very well in search engine. Infact I am pretty sure, mahalo has very little direct traffic and it is getting all the traffic from search engines only.

So how without any backlinks, Mahalo is able to get pages at the top when me, you and everyone else is struggling to rank ? Here is why -

1. Authority site - Mahalo has got tons of backlinks due to media coverage from various sites making it an authority site. Now once you get that authority status, search engines started trusting you blindly. Which means, even if there are 4 different sites with similar content, the chances are very high that content from authority site will be shown at the top.

2. Link Structure - Mahalo is following wikipedia kind of link structure with no subdirectories or categories in it (which is the best way). Personally I will always advice people to avoid categories unless it is can be used for something. Having urls like /movies/sixteen_candles_review is fine if that /movies/ is used in your site/blog for something else too otherwise no point in keeping it. Just stick to /sixteen_candles_review like Mahalo is doing.

3. Use of H2 and other Tags - If we take a sample page say this one of Mahalo, you can see the usage of H2 and H3 Tags. 8 times they have used H1/H2/H3 tags and 2 times bold tags for the key word “pumpkin seeds”. Though they are overdoing it (I won’t be surprised if Mahalo get penalized for this overuse). So always try to use H2 and H3 as well as strong/bold tag with your keyphrase.

4. High Keyword Density - That sample page of Mahalo is 6.3% keyword density (58 out of 1832) which is very very high. Ideally you want to keep it 2 percent to make it look natural but anyway Mahalo is getting way due to Reason 1.

5. Perfect titles - Check some 20-30 pages of Mahalo and you can see how each Title is the most obvious possible phrase. I mean “How to Cook Pumpkin Seeds” is the Best title you can come up with. (no need of using Best, Great, amazing). Also earlier Mahalo was only having Keyphrase as the title but now they have used “Mahalo” too for branding purpose. You may like to read my previous Post about Best SEO Titles

There are few smaller things as well like using nofollow for sitewide links which they have used but the above 5 points plays almost all the part in ranking Mahalo pages very high. Browse the site and see few pages and you can easily get the points If you have something to say than please tell as comments.

Cheers and Have a Nice Day

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