
He Calls Google A Vampire, But Mark Cuban’s Mahalo Is Doing The Sucking - medianama
http://searchengineland.com/google-vampire-mark-cuban-mahalo-35039
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pclark
Seems a bit of a stretch to criticise Mark Cubans comments based on an
investment he made. Seems unlikely he's aware of their SEO tactics.

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jwarzech
I think your completely right. I was once talking with an angel about one of
the companies they had invested in and got the reply "I don't know what their
doing I'm just an investor." Whether this is a good thing or not is up to
discussion.

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Psyonic
I don't see that as much of an excuse. Investing in a company isn't like
paying taxes; you voluntarily decide who to invest in, and ethically (if not
legally) you have some responsibility for their actions.

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josefresco
What's with Danny Sullivan's and searchenginelands's crusade against Mahalo?
Is it just blogsphere link-bait or is there a reason for all this attention on
their questionable business model?

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mikeyur
It's kind of a combined attack from anyone in the SEO space.

Mahalo was built up going by Google's search guidelines and has made itself an
authority online. They're at a level where almost anything they publish gets
picked up immediately and ranks fairly well in the SERPs. What they're doing
currently are practicing grey/black hat tactics of which almost all are
frowned upon by Google (ie. acting as a content scraper with no original
content). Because of this authority they've built before, they currently get
away with it.

Small sites would be banned or punished for some of the things they're doing,
but they haven't even received a slap on the wrist.

Another reason this gets a lot of us SEOs fired up is because Mahalo is doing
the same thing Jason preached against. He called everyone in the SEO industry
a scumbag and preached about how Mahalo would put SEOs out of business with
their 'human powered search'. Mahalo as a destination site failed so they
switched to become (essentially) an article directory who get most of their
traffic organically through search. The problem is they're creating low value
pages with nothing but ads and scraped content. Those pages are what Jason
claimed he wanted to get rid of in the first place, one of the reasons he
started Mahalo.

The SEO community is pissed about this because it gives us a bad name,
building on the bad PR we got when Jason went on this gigantic anti-SEO
campaign a couple years back. We're just trying to point out the hypocrisy
here and the only way to do that is to present our argument and hope that
Google hears us.

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gojomo
Portfolio theory, anyone?

Investing isn't 'gotcha' politics or rhetoric. There's no reason why all a
person's investments have to advance some unified self-consistent theory of
the world. In fact, it's almost certainly better if they don't.

If an investor is choosing well, their investments altogether can be like a
roulette wheel where red, black, and green all have positive expectations. No,
they can't each come up at the same time, but that exclusivity doesn't make it
irrational to bet them all simultaneously.

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bobbyi
It's not just about diversifying, but about allowing the companies you invest
in to make their own decisions.

I don't think anybody here would be happy about once of their investors trying
to force them to delist themselves from google.

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dpcan
This was a pretty good advertisement for Mahalo. I didn't even need Google to
find it.

Cuban may simply be voicing that finding something in a search index doesn't
compare to the value of finding something through the social graph or
something hand-picked by humans.

But I didn't get to see his whole presentation. Just the two sentences this
author ripped from it. (tongue in cheek)

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shuleatt
i believe that when mahalo launched it was meant to be a competitor
(alternative to google). However, they have now revised their model and
leverage google to drive traffic. So when cuban invested he may have seen it
as a different play than it now is

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euroclydon
Maybe Cuban meant: "Hey pitiful newspapers, find a way to make money, like I
did."

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kgosser
Really good article, imo

