Fed up with Mahalo's search engine spam? Report it here

Oh, I'm not criticising your campaign, I'm just saying, I've never actually seen one of those Mahalo pages, so I couldn't report them even if I wanted to!

Does that I've made it? http://www.mahalo.com/cornify

That's what I thought when someone started scraping my feed. It didn't make me feel any better in the long run though. And the bigger problem is that even if you send them a DMCA notice they just take it down and then set it up again on a different domain. They are in it for the quick profit, not the long haul.

For a long time, everything I wrote would get re-blogged by dozens of spammy blogs all across the internet, occasionally with the odd misspelling thrown in to simulate original content.

My solution was to become less interesting.

I'm waiting to see if Google will do anything with the report.

I visited that link for the first time. Had to go through the intro page with the two big green buttons. Chose the "search history" button (not the All Web, with toolbar). My history page was completely empty.

Then I tested one search (in another window). Refresh history page, there it is. So it was off before, clicking the button had turned it on.

I deleted that history item, then clicked the "pause" link on the side-list. Was informed that no history would be collected until I clicked "resume".

TL;DR: if going in for the first time, hitting a button on that page will start collecting search history. Apparently.

They may do it, but:

(1) I don't use Google Toolbar, which is required for that to work (

2) I'm trying to wean myself away from Google for everything by dividing my usage out to other search engines

A single vendor solution for something so private and important is undesirable, on general principals. It's a small step, but an important one, at least to me.

This is incredibly hard. Most likely they won't rank for the exact same Wikipedia topic, but for more specific queries like "foo bar widget spam other term". Most likely due to the combination of all their scraped content. Google's duplicate content detection is definitely not rock solid and thats why these sites are working. For years in the past and for years to come.

So if a user searches for "foo" he lands on wikipedia, if he wants to get more specific and searches for "foo bar widget spam other term" he lands on the mahalo duplicate content page, again with the same content. Because user research (Don't make me think - Steve Krugs) has shown that if users do not find what they are looking for, they look for the fastest way out. The fastest way out is through all ads placed on Mahalo and thats why they make money.

I hope you and everyone else now sees that all of these pages who make a little impact on their own but a big one on the whole are decreasing the quality of Google's index. And because these terms are so specific its hard (and pointless) to point them out specifically. If you are in Google's index, you rank for some terms, else you wouldn't be indexed, this query conveniently points out all spammy pages on Mahalo so Google can take appropriate action....unless they actually give Mahalo a different treatment than all those other spam sites.