Maybe Jason Calacanis isn't being totally honest about Mahalo? | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Jason Calacanis isn't being totally honest about Mahalo?

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78 pointsdazz52 comments

Why this crusade against Mahalo/Calacanis? Why isn't this sort of critique aimed at Google, who is after all indexing and profiting off of sites like (and much worse than) Mahalo.

I find all these posts interesting, but it seems Jason is being portrayed as the most at fault. Isn't he just playing the Google 'game' better than most?

When I see SPAM in Google's index that is ranking high I don't get mad at the spammers but rather at Google for allowing and often times making huge money off of SPAM they index.

I'd say Google hasn't done it's part either, but people may be taking some schadenfreude at the fact that Calacanis sells himself as a hard-headed, tech-driven entrepreneur, when in fact he is an asshole and a spammer.

This is very much a critique against Google, but more towards the pass that they keep giving Jason. Jason is most definitely not playing the game better than most, and in fact his violations of Google's quality guidelines are in many cases way more blatant than other spam sites, and are definitely more high profile... yet for some odd reason Google refuses to penalize them. Other sites belonging to honest webmasters get penalized on a daily basis, yet Jason appears to be immune.

I think this is an object lesson in the value of social skills and conference going. I doubt that Calacanis would be able to keep this circus going if he hadn't cultivated some excellent relationships inside Google. I can't really blame the Googlers involved; it's hard to knowingly wreck the business of someone who's been a good friend, even if you know they deserve it.

I've never understood this either. Google pretty much funds all the spam, if they had and enforced stronger policies on AdSense it would cripple spammers and made-for-ads crap.

You can report bad sites and people abusing AdSense but nothing ever happens. I wonder if anyone actually gets the reports at all - I reported a site I came across several weeks ago for perfectly aligning every block of ads with sets of images to disguise them as content, obviously nobody from Google's even clicked the link because they're still doing it and it's an immediately obvious violation.

This obsession with Calacanis/Mahalo is becoming a Hacker News tic along the lines of the reddit obsession with Bacon/Narwhals/Keanu Reeves.

Most of the content is regurgitated as well. If you have such an issue with Mahalo and/or Mr. Calacanis: STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM.

Nothing dooms a site to the shadows of history like being completely and utterly forgotten.

That would be great if Google would forget them. Occasionally I'll search for something and see a Mahalo page that seems to have at least a pointer to what I need, when in reality I'm just inundated with AdSense and the content that seemed to be there either isn't anymore or never was (i.e., it was a crappily autogenerated page that has an intro paragraph seemingly from someone's blog or something with no link or other content).

The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.

Doesn't Google have a feature:

[x] Never show me any more results from foo.com I hate that site. Remember my preference.

If not, it should do.

Alas people who visit Mahalo for no other reason than Jason's linkfarm directed their search their may not hate the site, although the person running the site with real content does.

Take a look at the how to play guitar chords page... it's everything you would want if you did that search.

people stay on that page for 20-60 minutes!!! and there are 50 people on that page all the time learning to play guitar chords. sorry it's not how to set up a cassandra cluster, but it is of value to people learning to do something basic.

best jcal

Cool. If that's the case, if they get everything they need from that page, you can safely remove all of the adsense plastered all over the page right? Since people are sitting on that page learning to play chords, and the content is so awesome.

Nice. Who did you steal the content from? Or do you just, out of the goodness of your heart, pay a professional guitar player to write content for you and give it away to the Internet for free?

In Jason's defence (I still think he's a scumbag) he pays people to aggregate data from multiple sources. That's about as unethical as writing a paper that cites multiple sources (provided he's actually using a reasonable number of sites and is within fair use).

This, of course, doesn't excuse the fake domains and link farming.

It sounds awesome Jason - so why do you need to register a whole bunch of different domains and point to the content, rather than just acquiring real links, like other sites with valuable content do?

Since this issue has been raised many times on HN, could you show the kind of queries that point back to Mahalo in the results. I use Google daily but it never happened to me.

Seconding this. After years of heavy googling, I just came upon my first Mahalo page a few days ago. It was in probably the 6th or 7th position on the first page, and gave me the answer I needed.

The pages I get in my Google results from Mahalo seem to be along the same lines as the Experts Exchange pages you get. Annoying pages with crap ads all over them that just clog up your results.

Google should just blacklist the entire domain and be done with it. Do they really provide any value to the Internet at all?

If you scroll to the bottom of the very long Experts Exchange page, the question and answers are down there. While I realize your question was meant to be rhetorical, EE has answered my question a few times, and I want to say that they do provide some value, which I suppose is reflected in its page rank.

Yeah, I realize if you scroll all the way to the bottom and ignore all of the up-selling of premium access, you can see the real answer, but their pages are designed specifically so that you don't notice this and don't bother to scroll so far. I just use Experts Exchange as an example because they seem to be another company that uses SEO gaming techniques to get a PageRank that isn't really justified based on their content.

I'll admit, I have gotten an answer or two from EE, but at the same time I also wonder where they stole the real content from. These companies that do SEO rarely generate any real content themselves. They all violate copyright in flagrant ways.

Thank you.... and I agree.

We are 100% SEO compliment to best practices and we delete/deindex/build out any community pages that are short every month. Google Knol, Wikipedia, About.com, eHow and Associated Content don't do this!

We are uber agressive about removing short pages, and investing thousands of dollars in top pages. like these two: http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-make-strawberry-shortcake http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-play-guitar-chords

These claims by hater SEOs are basically B.S. They take the last 10,000 pages the community are working on and say "gotcha!!! these pages suck!" Well, they are being worked on! Come back in 60-90 days and they will be built out or they will be deindexed. that simple.

... absurd.

Is this a fake account?

I thought this was Jason's HN account: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jasonmcalacanis

Looks like it is Jason... verified via Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason/status/16702228671

back on my old account... had linked that to Facebook, so had to activate my FB account to login reset password, deactivate again, etc.

will post under this one going forward.

I see http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-make-strawberry-shortcake has 4 adsense units on it. Adsense says you're allowed a maximum of 3.

Something I'm missing? Or is there some special Google deal by which you can add more than 3 and get away with it?

In terms of user experience, I think the ratio of content to adverts on that page (Which you seem to cite as a good page) is way out. Tons of adverts / cross promotion etc, and a little bit of content in the middle.

Google gives permission to some sites to do more. we are one of those sites.

Do you think those types of pages are providing real value to users? Come on... get real.

There's obviously a reverse incentive at play here which stinks (IMHO). If you make the page useful to users, they wouldn't click on any of the ads. So it's in your best interest to create bare minimum pages, or pages that give the users a token amount of value - the bare minimum.

I'm surprised at Google for allowing this sort of thing and specifically allowing you to put even more ads up than is usually allowed.

People: parent is a factoid. What's the point in downvoting that?

so than they are being worked on and not crawled by Google?

No, they are already being crawled and indexed by Google. Jason was lying about that. He banks heavily on the fact that it takes significantly more energy for others to check his facts than it does for him to make them up.

I certainly hope you didn't invest much into that strawberry shortcake page. It just tells you to pile some sliced strawberries onto a premade cake. The first two paragraphs say the same thing, probably one is a rewrite of the other. Top quality stuff. Then it's scattered with links to pages with no content and lots of ads.

To be fair, I don't think much of "SEO Best practices". It's still attempting to game an algorithm to push crap to the top where it doesn't belong. I'm a fan of natural search results.

I just don't care to see the constant beating on any subject over and over again and it's at the point that hearing the name "Mahalo" makes me grind my teeth.

I haven't really seen much quality from what I've used of Mahalo; to me it's mostly adsense spam and skeleton pages. I'm sure there's someone out there finding it useful but it really does seem to be mostly making revenue off of adsense and SEO "best practices". If you can sustain a business off this, great.

I just don't care to see the subject beaten to death constantly. If people don't like Mahalo, then they should create something better to push it out of the way rather than endlessly whining about how much it annoys them.

When you use terms like "Hater SEOs" it just sounds absurd. I say this having been involved in part of that side of the web world in the past: SEOs are the used car salesmen of the Internet. Nobody really needs them yet their crappy late night TV Ads manage to find enough suckers to keep them in Pomade and Leisure Suits year after year.

Jason you're so full of shit it's not even funny anymore. Stop playing innocent, you're a fucking content stealing spammer who has the good luck to have enough connections to prevent you from being de-indexed by Google. The whole we de-index crappy pages stuff is beyond old, don't index crappy pages in the first place and don't steal content from other sites, that's what an honest person would do, but of course you're not, you're just full of shit.

I wouldn't submit one of these myself, but I think the reason they keep turning up is pretty evident:

Superficially (in the sense that I've never really looked carefully), it looks like he's gaming Google and getting away with it, which is a pretty big deal if it's true.

The effect of every HN reader ignoring Mahalo is so small it is likely to be mathematically discontinuous.

I wonder how much money Google is making off the Mahalo domain?

Google is probably making a lot of money off of Mahalo. Anyone want to take a stab at what that number could be?

Probably more than they make of Knol :-)

I don't understand how the author can say that there aren't coupons on those coupon pages. Apparently since the coupons are from an affiliate program with Savings.com they don't count.

When I go to the "1800Pools Coupons" page that he linked, the main content box has an offer for "$25 off Orders Over $500" . When I click on this, it tells me that the coupon code is "AFF25" and can be added during checkout on the 1800Pools website.

http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons

Where's the problem? Isn't that exactly what someone who searched on google for "1800pools coupons" is looking for?

Savings.com != Mahalo.com. There is no reason to rank Mahalo... if that is the site being looked for then rank Savings.com instead.

It is what is known as a "thin affiliate" site, and it adds a layer of navigation to the user and middleman payouts to the advertiser, lowering user experience and driving up advertiser costs.

But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". The user has never heard of Savings.com and doesn't care about them. They user is looking for coupon codes and they are listed clearly on the Mahalo landing page.

The point of an affiliate program is to let other people distribute the coupons, so it's not as if he is doing something shady by "scraping" content from elsewhere as the article implies.

I do agree that he is violating AdSense rules and shouldn't have the AdSense boxes on those pages, but (correct me if I'm wrong) Matt Cutts isn't involved in AdSense and is just focussed on indexing, so that's not the issue at hand when the author is attacking him.

re: But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for".

Yes, it is, the searcher doesn't know that though. That's Google's job, to rank the most relevant sites to the query. If those coupons are what the user is looking for then that site is what should come up first.

I also want to add that at this moment Savings.com does indeed outrank Mahalo.com for that query. While this may change (and based on past experience with Mahalo's empty pages many of them will outrank other sites that are higher quality eventually), that is not what the bulk of the issue is. Those Savings.com feeds are not "human powered" anything. They are exactly the kinds of pages that Jason told Matt Cutts he had removed from his site. They are the antithesis of what Jason claimed his site was all about just 4 days ago. That's the main issue.

FYI: Calacanis sits on the board of Savings.com.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/savingscom-makes-coupons-mo...

I thought this issue was long gone? Can we just move on please?

The simple matter here is that people should not be attacking Mahalo because of their "spam" or whatever else you think they're doing. If you want to attack them, you should also be ripping apart all the results for the front page results for viagra, weight loss, acne, etc.

All they're doing is taking advantage of Google's weaknesses. If you use Google on a daily basis, which the majority of us do, but their results are not the high quality you're expecting them to be, why the hell would you be getting mad at the results showing up instead of the site serving up the results?

Everyone needs to lay off and start criticizing Google if anything.

Let's talk about something more interesting:

1. Open Angel Forum has gotten a dozen startups funded. 2. Open Angel Forum is now in eight cities, and will be in San Francisco this Thursday. 3. The Launch Conference next winter will be a platform for 30-50 startups to launch AND raise their seed/A-rounds.

These SEO attacks are absurd at this point... I may be outspoken, but this is a slam job done by a group of SEOs who have it out for me. It's sad that they can take over HackerNews so easily.

There's no conspiracy, the facts speak for themselves. I admire your tenacity in responding to these posts, but you've had a bit too much of your own koolaid. Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test, period.

As a completely independent observer having no stakes in this game, I think that the facts absolutely don't point this way. None of your "arguments" has explicitly refuted the attacks. All refutations have been shown (with proof) to be invalid.

Finally, it just does not seem like all that plastered excessive AdSense is doing the Internet any good at all. What value are you providing there, exactly? If those are just pages which don't get much traffic, you could just remove the AdSense from there and the world will thank you for it.

I'd like to echo ashu's comments; I have no skin in the SEO game and Mahalo doesn't pass the smell test for me. There might be a bias on HN against you or your site, but if you want to change that, it's your job to argue with solid facts that can't be refuted with a 5 minute Google search.

The fact that you're trying to completely change the subject with your post about the Open Angel Forum doesn't really help your cause, either.

Do you really hold up the pages you post from Mahalo as a shining beacon of something you want to be known for?

Pages full of auto-generated content and ads which you have managed to get Google to index?

I'd understand if you were desperate for cash and needed the adsense revenue, but surely it'd be better to create a site that has some sort of quality content that you can be proud of?

Ignore the "SEO Attacks" stuff.

* You automatically create pages with no real content * You plaster them with ads * You get them indexed by Google

That doesn't seem to me to be something good for the web.

He doesn't care, he's a scumbag spammer and will endlessly play innocent no matter what facts you present him.

Sure, I just don't understand why, unless he's really desperate for cash.

Why? Haven't you ever met anyone that seems borderline sociopath? It's not so much needing money as it is not giving the slightest shit about other people. Other people are simply there to be manipulated and taken advantage of for personal gain, that's why.

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