Jason Calacanis, Founder and CEO of Mahalo.com, delivered the afternoon keynote at Search Engine Strategies in New York City today.

Jason opened with a revised version of his “SEO is bullshit” comment at SES a couple years ago. He explained that now he thinks that black hat SEO is bullshit, but white hat SEO is very important.

And he now regards himself as a white hat SEO with his work at Mahalo.com.

Jason went over some history behind Mahalo and touted the quality of the links included.

“You will never find a spam link in Mahalo. It’s impossible.”

After the chat on Mahalo, the real action started with a live Q&A.

Kevin Ryan, VP, Global Director, SES & Search Engine Watch, asked questions to Jason that were previously submitted, as well as questions from the audience.

The following is paraphrased from Jason’s comments…

A lot of affiliates and SEOs are outsiders from the Silicon Valley crowd, and the affiliates and SEOs are some of the smartest hustlers out there. That’s hustlers in a good, Jay Z kind of way.

They think in the short term.

…

People don’t want products that have no personality behind them.

You really want to engage people and talk to them. I am the first to admit that I am overexposed.

…

I don’t believe one solution is going to solve the search problem. It’s a blended solution including the long tail, niche search engines, Google, social bookmarking, etc.

The person who wins is the one who blends all of these search processes into one.

All people care about is the result and that they are being pointed to the right stuff.

…

The affiliate stuff has potential when we are hand crafting a page. There is some promising stuff there - we’ll see.

I don’t know enough about it to know if it is going to work or not.

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Take me on in a discussion of my ideas. Don’t make things personal.

It sometimes gets to a level of viciousness.

Life is short. Be nice. Have a good debate.