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Comment by jcalacanis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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