Gaming the google ranking system is only effective because of the monoculture.
Pagerank turned out to be the death knell to the value of linking to someone, it created an opportunity to be gamed so large that it changed the nature of the object (the internet) that it was supposed to be measuring.
A good measuring device does not 'load' the circuit to the point that it stops to function...
If you introduce a new system, it has to be at least as good as what we have now: no one would want to sacrifice relevant results.
It is wrong to think about pagerank as a single algorithm: it is a family, the common things being that these algorithms analyze the global link graph (yes, I lumped the HITS algorithm in the same family).
The problem is, if you don't use the link graph, there is not much left. There is the content, but this is not enough: before Google you could often steal someone's high ranking by just copying his content verbatim or maybe tweaking it a little. So, pagerank is actually a big improvement over what was out there before.
Pagerank can be thought as an estimation of the traffic a website gets. Suppose you can measure the actual traffic (e.g. by forcing all sites to install google analytics). That would be a pretty well gaming-proofed system, but you would introduce so much inertia - every new site would have a huge chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.
You honestly believe Google would ever blacklist a prominent startup like Mahalo?
I don't understand why Calacanis or Mahalo are important enough to warrant such special treatment, but I don't think I'm Mahalo's target audience. I've never visited the site. That's why I was interested in more information. Thanks!
Sure. Google's trust and search quality are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Mahalo is not.
I must honestly admit I have no idea who Mahalo is, and by reading this headline I automatically assumed it was a spam network.
They might be well known and influential to you, but that doesn't automatically translate to the rest of the internet.
nice connection there
Everyone has a blog roll, and most blogs have a "WIN Grid" at the bottom (a feature I created at Weblogs, Inc. where at the bottom of engadget/autoblog/joystiq/etc you see the headlines from the other sites).
From what I've seen said at conference the search engines only pass a small amount of page rank from these areas so it's not a major deal to syndicate your content around.
HackADay is now owned by Mahalo (we didn't sell it to AOL in the WEblogs, Inc. sale for obvious reasons... like hacking TimeWarner cable boxes :-). There is nothing wrong with syndicating headlines between mahalo and HackAday. If we're told there is we will stop.
This is just the SEO community upset at me for saying that "seo is BS" back in 1995!
I think it's more of a case where they are upset at you for gaming them for knowledge and advice, then beating them at their own game, which, by the way, has resulted in me having a tremendous amount of admiration for you...
You've 'scaled' SEO and kept the product quality. Kudos, J.
Edit: Oh, and it was 2005, not 1995 - since you seem to appreciate people correcting you ;^)