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.
The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.
Google should just blacklist the entire domain and be done with it. Do they really provide any value to the Internet at all?
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.
[x] Never show me any more results from foo.com I hate that site. Remember my preference.
If not, it should do.
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
This, of course, doesn't excuse the fake domains and link farming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought this was Jason's HN account: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jasonmcalacanis
will post under this one going forward.
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.