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!