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Comment by wheaties | Hacker News Reader

The rub is, if Google were to block all of Mahalo, a lawsuit would surely be filed.

And Mahalo would lose. Google penalizes SEO spammers hundreds of times every day. It's very easy to see that Mahalo does not follow the rules.

I do not think anyone is asking for all of Mahalo to be blocked. The major issue is the insane amount of auto-generated pages that are not given a noindex call and are also added to the site map xml file.

These actions appear to be conscious choices to make sure that google will index these pages, which according to several sources, have nothing but "scraped" content and are therefore spam.

Google is providing a free service in a field in which there is intense competition. I don't see what basis anyone would have for filing a lawsuit for not being indexed in Google.

Regardless, it still happens all the time.

agreed.

They could argue that Google has a monopoly on online search, and that excluding people from their search results is an illegal restraint of trade. I don't think that such a case would be a cut-and-dry victory for Google if the spammer (as in this case) has the money to fight them.

Ridiculous. I don't know how the law works but I do know that if Google was to somehow lose a case like that, their entire search engine would be worthless incredibly quickly with grey hat/black hat people going crazy.

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