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.