How long has Mahalo been using keyword domains like this?

Contrary to what these initial comments are suggesting, Mahalo isn't duplicating content across all of these sites. These sites are each targeted at specific verticals, and (are intended to) only have questions and answers related to that vertical. It's a strategy that worked for Calacanis at Weblogs, Inc. (to a degree--eventually a lot of superniche blogs were shuttered or consolidated into the higher-profile brands) and I suspect it'll work again.

As for Google's rankings, I don't think these sites are any worse off than the Stack Exchange sites, which all share the same basic design and markup and many of the same boilerplate About, etc. pages.

Is it great for users, i.e. people actually trying to find answers? Well, that's an open question. I think ultimately it is because someone looking for FarmVille answers (yes, Mahalo has such a site, and yes, an incredible number of people have FarmVille questions) is going to get more relevant results than they'll find on Mahalo Answers proper. If these sites didn't exist would they find better, or faster, answers to their questions? I think sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn't. Generally answers on Mahalo Answers are higher-quality than, say, Yahoo! Answers, which I see showing up in the results for many of my Google searches.

I don't blame anyone for disliking the practice--it does have a bit of a smell--but I do think it's a good business decision for Calacanis et al.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Jason Calacanis at Weblogs, Inc. and Propeller (nee Netscape.com) and enjoyed the experience. I haven't talked to him in a couple years but I bet if I called him up he'd do me a solid. Oh, I was also an early Mahalo beta-tester and use Mahalo Answers once every couple of months.)

I think calling these these kinds of practices "Search Engine Optimisation" is a little perverse. "Search Engine Deception" would be a better term. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes SEO such as shady business nowadays. It might work for now, but it's still a hack based on the current implementation of search engines that will likely be punished later on.

This is autoblogging. This won't work. Google will see the blog theme fingerprint and will either lessen the index or de-index. Also, the dupe content is another factor that gets you de-indexed.

Now if they used a generic, common theme, and different themes; and then if they used unique, synonymized content -- these things would perhaps get past the Google filter unless of course something triggers a manual review at Google and a human checks it.

A site has flags at Google (that's the theory) and if you throw enough flags, then it sometimes triggers an automatic de-index or PR lessening. In some cases, and again this is all theory, it triggers a manual review and they have a human review what's going on to see if they need to alert the core team on a search engine tweak.

Jason sits here and tries to claim there is nothing wrong with registering trademarks in domains when about a month ago, Mahalo lost a domain to StateFarm because Mahalo had violated their trademark.

http://domains.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1317317.htm

So Jason, did you not know you had lost a domain or are you flat out lying about your knowledge of how trademarks and domains work?

Is there actually a benefit from doing this for Mahalo? Wouldn't google just recognize that their content is duped all over the place?

Can someone explain what exactly this is and why it is bad? I am not very well-versed in the Google-fu.

based on the age of my random selection of those domain names, they started doing it early this year.

There are two things going on here.

1. Generating domains that match exact search terms is very common and can be quite effective. This is not 'bad' in google ethics - think of how there is no search bar in chrome - when i type 'hacker news' into chrome, hackernews.com is #3; the line between a search and almost typing in an exact domain name makes these domains valuable, and uneducated users who don't know the difference between a search and a domain mean this won't change anytime soon.

2. Mahalo could be auto-generating content that should be penalized because it is duplicate or spammy. This is, within the terms of the googleverse, 'bad' and can be penalized. However it's not clear that all of those sites are exactly the same (i didn't click through each one) - they may be different enough but just share a similar URL structure, which if the content is different, is not really an issue.

So not only are they content thieves, they are also cybersquatters with names like:

  starwarsanswers.com
  iphoneqna.com
  facebook-questions.com
  nfl-questions.com
  squarespaceanswer.scom
  astonmartinanswers.com
  volkswagenanswers.com

And that's just the first 2 pages of results.

Disclaimer: I worked for Mahalo last year.

You guys are over estimating the value of the domain names. They is a reason they were able to mass register these domains for just the base registration fee and not have to haggle with any private owners for a transfer. ____ answers is not a popular search query. I doubt any of domains are queries that generate more tha 500 searches a month. These domains have no value unless niche communities form around them and long tail content is generated as a result.

that's pretty scummy