
Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White - mocy
http://www.seobook.com/black-hat-seo-case-study
======
callmeed
Here's a weird experience I had: I tweeted about a startup idea of a "woot.com
site for travel" <http://twitter.com/callmeed/status/1422601143>

Later that day, it somehow got turned into a Mahalo question (I didn't submit
it). I thought it was interesting that Jason himself commented on it, but it
still seemed strange.

Now, when you google "Woot.com for travel" or "Woot for travel", that Mahalo
page comes up on position 1 or 3.

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vaksel
that's the beauty of authority sites, you can rank for stuff just by
mentioning them once.

~~~
javery
This is the flaw in how Google does things that competitors need to exploit.
Authority should be more topic based then site-wide.

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vaksel
yeah I remember reading a blog a few days ago, it was a PR8, and the guy did
an experiment. Just added a link for something viagra related. Just a single
link.

And within a week he managed to get on a front page in Google results.

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kyro
Jesus, that's about as s(c/p)ammy as you can get. Your business is rooted in
theft and trickery and deception, Jason.

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jfornear
I honestly don't understand how this is anything new? Mahalo always has been a
sketchy SEO scam that only a shameless self-promoter could pull off...

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aristus
Jason, any comment?

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vaksel
my guess it's "oh shit!", followed by a prayer that Google doesn't do
anything.

I don't think he has anything to worry about for that last part, Google is
notorious for letting big sites off the hook(remember Target?) + here Google
is also making their share of money off adsense

~~~
vladmato
And Scribd.com, exact same model, scrape content regardless of copyrights,
straps adsense on it, makes money.

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bonsaitree
Agreed. I think Merlin Mann has the best take yet on Scribd:
<http://tinyurl.com/yzl3mod>

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blasdel
And pg capriciously blacklisted his domain from news.yc in response

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ericb
You are free to question PG's motives and cry censorship, but to me, that blog
post was malicious, tasteless, angry drivel that I really wouldn't want to see
on here, whether it was about a YC company or not.

~~~
bonsaitree
Even a casual search of ScribD content will reveal the motives for Mr. Mann's
post. He has every right to be angry. The malice has been well-earned by
ScribD's repeated actions with other creator's content for nearly its entire
history.

While it's true there's no accounting for taste, I suggest you consult the
dictionary on the definition of 'drivel'.

At the end of the day, PG can do, essentially, whatever he likes with the
content, routing (or lack there of), and posting permissions on Hacker News.
It's HIS site.

It's a shame that ScribD doesn't seem to play by an equivalent set of
ownership principles. Namely, hosting and making money off other creator's
content without so much as asking their permission; let alone proffering any
ad-revenue sharing.

~~~
ericb
>I suggest you consult the dictionary on the definition of 'drivel'.

I _meant_ drivel. The linked post starts with:

> _So, I went with, “fuckyourwhoremotherinheronegoodear.”_

Drivel is "childish talk" (mom insults, anyone?)
<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/drivel>

As to your other points, I think they are good. For me, intelligent debate
does not talk about fucking anyone's whore mother in their ear. If that is
what I was looking for, I'd read YouTube comments.

edit: admittedly, tptacek does have a point re: the flag button vs. blacklist.

~~~
bonsaitree
Kudos indeed. I'm glad Tptacek brought up the often-neglected 'flag' feature.

Again, there's no accounting for taste, but offhand I'd say labeling curse
words, and their creative use, as "childish" is quite overreaching. Have you
read any David Mamet, Frank McCourt, or Larry McMurtry lately? Do you honestly
feel a child would have sufficient skill to structure prose in that fashion?

~~~
ericb
I never said anything about cursing. I said mom insults were childish. So
yeah, if I _had_ said that, that would have been overreaching.

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fuzzmeister
This article makes it clear that Mahalo is in many ways quite similar to
another questionably ethical startup, Demand Media. Here's the fascinating
Wired article:

<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1>

~~~
atamyrat
One important difference is that Demand Media actually produces their content
themselves.

~~~
patio11
Right. Demand Media has a distributed, virtualized workforce of freelancers.
(Read the Wired article on it. That is some of their best reporting. Ever.)
Mahalo used to have in-house editors before they moved to mostly outsourced
"editors" before they realized editors cost a lot of money and firing them
didn't decrease revenues in the slightest. At the moment their editorial staff
is a thin pretense maintained to keep the site from getting bounced out of the
index.

Disclaimer: As with most other massive content plays which have large
audiences of unsophisticated Internet users, I indirectly subsidize Mahalo
through AdSense expenditures. To the tune of probably over a hundred bucks
last year, but I don't have my numbers in front of me. Like I mentioned in my
blog post earlier today, they send great traffic (i.e. it is cheap and
converts well) because my ads _are_ the content on their pages.

That is disquieting to me in some ways. I could ban them and start chopping
off heads from the Demand Media hydra in my AdSense account, but that would
consume vast amounts of my time and just cost me money.

~~~
krtl
Right. Mahalo had a call out for 17 or so "interns/volunteers" a few months
back... thats who replaced the editorial staff.

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NZ_Matt
Great article!

Just a few days ago I landed on a Maholo page from a google search. My exact
thoughts were "where is the content".

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jcromartie
Who would have thought that the guy who said (paraphrased) "want to have a
life? then work somewhere else!" would be slimy?

I really don't understand how or why Jason Calacanis has any credibility or
notoriety today. Point me to Mahalo and I see an utterly worthless spammy
waste of a website that I and all of my peers avoid at all costs which was
built with exploitative labor practices.

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ojbyrne
Great article. "the willingness to lie just to get a bit of media ink" very
succinctly captures what I most disliked about my experiences amongst the
movers and shakers of California.

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tomh-
This pretty much proves once again that gaming search engines is here to stay.
There is still a lot of research to be done to make it harder to get away with
this type of websites, but luckily there are more and more ways, other than
Google, to find the content you are looking for.

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qeorge
You actually don't need all that much authority to get away with ranking
scraped content in Google. Despite their FUD, Google's duplicate content
detection algorithm seems to be largely non-existent.

For example, check out the Google results for <http://hackerne.ws>, which is a
page-for-page duplicate of news.ycombinator:

<http://www.google.com/q=site%3Ahackerne.ws>

10,000 pages indexed, not a single word of original content.

Note: I know hackerne.ws is not trying to be spammy, and merely parked the
domain improperly. If the owner is reading, all it would take is a simple 301
redirect to fix.

~~~
aditya
It's a CNAME to news.ycombinator.com:

lucidity% nslookup hackerne.ws

Server: 192.168.0.1

Address: 192.168.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: hackerne.ws

Address: 174.132.225.106

lucidity% nslookup news.ycombinator.com

Server: 192.168.0.1

Address: 192.168.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: news.ycombinator.com

Address: 174.132.225.106

lucidity%

~~~
aditya
It was a gift to HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=84039>

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whyenot
Why isn't it copyright infringement for Mahalo to scrape content like claimed
in the article? I don't see how either fair use or DMCA safe harbor would
apply (but I'm no lawyer). This seems like a lawsuit just waiting to happen.

~~~
wmf
They're just scraping page titles and occasionally short excerpts; most people
believe that's fair use.

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kareemm
i think it's interesting that jason - who manages his online reputation
exceptionally well (and speedily) - has yet to comment.

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monkeygrinder
Interesting article. Mahalo won't be the last site to exploit these methods.
There are a number of issues here: 1\. My boss said something interesting the
other day: As Google has already conquered search and is diversifying its
business into different areas, it is not paying as much diligence into its
search algorithm to weed out those sites that exploit it. Google makes money
from AdSense, so why would it be in a big hurry to take down sites that
exploit dodgy SEO practices. 2\. As for scraping content without any
backlinks, the media industry seems to have very little protection when it
comes to copyright. Existing copyright law is woefully unable to get to grips
with digital copying and display. If the content had been music, or films, the
RIAA would have clamped down so fast, Jason's head would be spinning. But we
are talking about digital publishing industry, where content has very little
protection at all. 3\. Even if we decide that taking the first paragraph is
fair use, not back linking or citing your source is still a copyright issue
(not to mention bad Internet etiquette).

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vaksel
good article, never noticed the the scraped content part

