Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com
smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com
The only thing the blackhats haven't taught me is how to get into the Google index and stay there - how are you doing it, Calacanis?
Mahalo is a black hat SEO site, that's given preferential treatment by Google. Any other black hat SEO site would have gotten delisted a month after launching.
Update:
1. Did we have show short pages in Mahalo? Yes.
2. How did they get there? Our users start topic pages and don't finish them.
3. Were they getting traffic? Not really... like < 6% of our traffic was from short pages. We know this because we've not deleted them or greatly improved them.
4. Why does this keep coming up with the SEOs? Because I called SEO bullsh#$t back in 2005 when someone asked me at a conference why Engadget and Joystiq were doing so well with SEO.
5. Do you still think SEO is bullshit? No, I don't. Back then I didn't know what SEO was and assumed it was spamming google so I said, "oh, that's bs." This was true at the time. At Weblogs Inc. we did zero SEO and we had amazing search traffic. Why? Well, it was later explained to me that we made a lot of content (20 posts a day across 50 blogs = a lot of posts), we got a lot of comments on them and we used keywords in the titles of the posts before anyone else used them. Today's I don't think SEO is BS. I think SEO is an essential part of building any startup just like building a viral loop, doing PR or hiring great people.
6. Are you sorry to the SEO community for hurting their feelings. Yes, I'm really really sorry.
7. I found a page that has no content on it? yes, that will happen from time to time... when we find them we delete, redirect or expand them. These will be in the < 1% of our corpus range. If you do find one email me jason at mahalo.com.
8. don't you have tools to do that? yes and no. we're building them. we need to balance turning off pages people are planning on building out vs. ones that are abandoned. So, you will see nofollow on pages with no content, and no follow on pages with < 100 words if they are older than X day, etc. This is all being built now.
That's it... there is nothing bad going on here. We're good people doing good work. Hundreds of people are making real money to take care of their families at Mahalo and I wish you guys would stop attacking them.
If you're pissed at me take it out on me, leave Mahalo out of it.
.... or don't. Who cares. This is so biased and absurd right now I don't think any is really taking it seriously any more. Aaron had a handful of good points last month, but now folks are just doing this to linkbait for their SEO sites.
great... trust me, this is making my experience reading HN annoying too. If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it. Clearly the system here is being abused.
This isn't about a small handful of pages that don't have content on them, and if you read the posts you were rebutting instead of trying so damn hard to make yourself sound better then you might actually have information you could use to improve your site.
The vast majority of the pages on Mahalo are empty pages devoid of human generated content. It is not like I am straining my ass off to find them, either. Click on this link, scroll down the page, click through to 20-30 pages (the ones with all lower case titles demonstrate what I am talking about most often, focus on those), and LOOK AT YOUR WEBSITE:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...
In order to appease Matt Cutts, who gave you the courtesy of warning you instead of banning you outright, you did in fact add noindex to all of those pages. 1 day later, after he saw that it was there, you removed it again.
Pretending not to know what is being talked about and making shit up in an attempt to garner pity for being picked on is not helping your cause any.
also, the no index thing is going to be on all pages under 100 original words.
we are working as fast as we can to resolve all these stubs, but many are owned by users and we don't want to just nuke them.... so, we're busy at work.
thanks for the feedback....
Also, if you are going to attack me and make accusations about what is being written, could you please at least have the courtesy to actually read the stuff first?
i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.
from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143512
or
we're removing (or building out) any page in our system created by our users with under 200 words of original content. This will take a couple of weeks but it's tarted.
from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144174
and now 100 words?
I have a mental picture of you and your engineers trying hard for months in vain to add no-index to all those pages.
Don't worry any more. I am here. Here is the code. Copy paste and everything will be fine:
if(content.length < 100){
content.setNoIndex(True);
}
Peace and Love
"If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it."
Hear Hear!
Over the years, my view of the Google's ranking algorithms went from dream-like (they are so smart they understand everything) to infant-like (just a bunch of keyword counters).
Obviously there has to be huge complexity involved, so my current view must be pessimistic, but still...
Just one (unrelated) example: search for "leader in online used cars" in Google. Does every human understand what I'm looking for? Here's search result #5: "Indian holy leader and BA stewardess arrested over prostitution".
That being said, just to add fuel to the fire, I did the same search on bing. All results were relevant, unlike Google's. But none of them gave me the answer I was looking for.
So then you're just left with "used cars." That result page looks reasonable to me.
Really, I'm smart enough to understand your explanation of how the tool works. The problem is that I'm in the 99th percentile in the field of "computer keyword understanding" over the general Internet population. So what does that say about the tool?
That there is probably room in the market for more search engines - perhaps specifically ones that specialise in translating only human queries and returning results rather than trying to be more general like Google is.
Like almost all professions that utilise tools in some way, sometimes you just need more specialised tools. A chef wouldn't be that great if he (or she) only had knives to cook with.
Personally, I think Google is a good tool. I feel my mental model of it is relatively simple, and from that, I can mostly get what I want. This is also a good time to plug a great article on tools: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/07/wolfram...
edit: My explanation was not that Google understand your search to be "used cars." My explanation was based on the assumption that you were looking for a place, online, to buy used cars from. The keywords "online" and "leader," muddied that. The search for "used cars" yields many places to buy used cars from, and the top entries are probably the "leaders."
Unless he wanted to find a page writing about "leader," like a review, or even an ad, rather than the top google-ranked used car page itself.
I think is no way you could ever build a successful search engine ranking algorithm that will not influence the web to the point where that algorithm will lose a lot of its initial edge.
He also has made a career out of being a professional asshole and making fun of "lifestyle businesses" that make products that people like and pay for. He thinks that if you're not a workaholic and want to enjoy your short time here on Earth then you shouldn't be working with startups.
This is who Jason is for those who do not know why his 'bad behavior' is so watched and talked about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Calacanis
Refresher: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
I agree its civility is borderline. But it's not an ad hominem attack because no argument was being made.
Or at least it was the first three times we read about it.
I think that's actually the interesting part of the story: How Calacanis has snowed so many smart and decent people into doing his bidding.
1) Sequoia funded both Mahalo and Google, so there's probably some leeway granted to Mahalo in that respect
or (my personal favourite)
2) People can get away with a lot more if they're in the public eye and are loud about it. Think OJ Simpson... Calacanis is definitely one that shouts a lot louder than most to get his point across.
I also noticed this snippet of code:
if(url.indexOf(”google.”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”search.yahoo”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”search.live”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”bing.”)!=-1){
if($(”#adsense_2719325″).parents(”#right-column”).length > 0 && !isImage){
$(”#adsense_2719325″).addClass(”afc_wide”);
}
$(”#adsense_2719325″).html(ads);
$(”#ads-section-2719325″).show();
} else {
$(”#ads-section-2719325″).hide();
}
What you can't do is use that to keyword stuff your site.
If there’s ever been a case of the pot calling the kettle black . . .
I have never seen anybody else lie that openly and get away with it.
Lets not forget he'll use his obligatory "Peace n love" signature...
As an aside, your comment about blocking sites manually for your users just crystallized the value of DuckDuckGo (and by extension other smaller search engines) to me. There is definite value in a search engine that has some opinions about what kind of results are considered quality results. There's probably a name for this; but "curated search engine" or "opinionated search engine" don't seem right.
It's kind of like the difference between a micro-brew and Google's Budweiser.
I think what angers people legitimately is two fold. First, Mahalo seems to be doing stuff that gets other people banned. Second, they're seemingly being really sketchy about it.
Personally, I think they are on the whole useless pages and am happy to block them. There are certainly a subset of useful pages, and I'd consider doing a tighter integration where I could promote just those pages in our Zero-click Info boxes. Same goes for something like Yahoo! Answers. Most of their pages are useless, but they have a subset that are really useful.
To your latter point, I couldn't agree more. I'm much more aggressive at de-listing what I deem to be "useless" sites. Google can't do this because they'd get too much flack for it, e.g. censorship.
This is the thing. The huge spotlight that guys like Aaron Wall are pointing at Mahalo right now I'm sure is making Calacanis and Co sweating bullets. For big cases like this, it's often a matter of managing perceptions and Google may definitely take action if the story becomes big enough.
The thing is, there are quite a few sites that really skirt the edge of what is acceptable. When these sites/companies are somewhat larger with lots of employees and contractors, well the effect of 'blacklisting' can affect A LOT of people's lives in a very bad way.
For the independent blackhatter, some spam side-site they spin off isn't their livelihood and won't ruin them if banned. Mahalo (and ilk) isn't just a technical matter. Of course if this story gets bigger and Google doesn't do something about it, then this sets a bad precedent for the spam-community to try and game Google. Sure Google will figure ways to deal with it, but if you're the guy dealing with the spam... well, you'd just rather it not exist from the beginning.
I'm really interested to see how this all plays out. From Google's side, Mahalo's side, etc. It's riveting stuff actually.
Question: how does somebody end up at this spam page? Google seems to do a good job of filtering stuff like this. It wasn't in the first 10 or so pages of search results for "aaron wall"
Second: the idea is not to rank for every page. But the marginal cost of one more page is basically zero. So if even 1% of them rank on page one, the return on investment can be pretty high.
Calacanis is in a tough position, to be honest. He can dial down the quality and automatically get more revenue for no extra money. But he can't reduce the capital expenditure he made to create this system in the first place.
It's sort of like being a janitor, but having a great connection for huge quantities of black tar heroin. You could be a really stand-up guy, but after a while, all the easy money gets tempting...
It was never an issue of how many of the empty pages were ranking per se (although quite a few do, just not that one), but rather of the sheer numbers of them that were collecting enough tiny quantities of of PageRank each, that was then (and is still, as a matter of fact) adding up to massive amounts of self-sustaining ranking power:
http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/02/22/apparently-j...
I hope that helps.
If you think about, if Google delists the site then thats probably their business model gone because Google is like 60% of search Market in the US and higher else where so if Google delists them and take away their Adsense then they are in trouble.
So let them taunt Google all they like and then see what happens when the Google Dragon wakes up because it won't be pretty.
(Edited for typos and readibility)
When Aaron Wall hounds them over it, they'll be more likely to make the right decision.
So, I think they care about Mahalo as a source of revenue about >< that much. They're probably more worried about possible anti-trust actions if they just drop Mahalo -- I bet that would shave more off their market cap than losing Mahalo as a customer.
http://investor.google.com/releases/2009Q4_google_earnings.h...
Those numbers are net sales, not gross revenue, so cost of revenue (revenue splits, traffic acquisition costs, etc.) are factored out.