
Mahalo Caught Spamming Google With PageRank Funneling Link Scheme - nickb
http://www.seobook.com/mahalo-caught-pagerank-funneling-link-scheme
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jwesley
The thing that pisses me off about Mahalo is that Calacanis goes around
claiming it's some type of innovative idea/technology and that everything
thing they do is for the benefit of the users. It's a straight SEO play, along
the lines of About.com. Everything they do is to increase Mahalo's search
traffic! Just look at the widget mentioned in that article. Does anyone really
want that set of links on their blog? Does it really help anyone? And all of
Jason's friends on the blog circuit still give Mahalo good press...

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jasonmcalacanis
Actually, search traffic is not really a good thing to build a business on.
It's nice to get started, but you really want something like Mahalo Answers
that brings back a core group of folks over and over again to do something
virtuous--like helping each other.

Syndicating tech headlines to a tech blog does actually help people. Also,
syndicating the questions you've asked/answered with our Mahalo Answers widget
also helps folks.

Also, I've never claimed we are so much innovative as practical. We really
just try to do the simple thing: provide folks with the content, links and Q&A
they want. The big win of Mahalo will be if we save a lot of people a LOT of
time and keep them safe.

That being said the system is fairly advanced running on things like hadoop,
nginx, memecache, etc.

Also, the idea of putting a virtual currency with knowledge exchange has never
been done. If it works we will have done something fairly historic: created a
currency for knowledge. That really hasn't been done before. I've been around
the world in the last two years looking at virtual currency and knowledge
exchange in places like Korean, China and Japan and the truth is folks are
using it for games 99% of the tim e (the other 1% is virtual gifts).

We're the ONLY people to have ever put a currency on a knowledge exchange.
That's fairly innovative from what folks have told me.... in fact some fairly
intelligent folks have called it very innovative to brilliant.

.... time will tell I guess. :-)

all the best, Jason

ps - if anyone wants to try Mahalo Answers signup and send me your account
name (or post the URL here) and I'll send you M$5 to spend.

~~~
jwesley
Add rel="nofollow" to the widget links and I'll believe your goal is to help
people and not game the search results like everyone else. There is nothing
wrong with optimizing for search traffic. Competition is all well and good.
But your site is nothing more than an ad-laden Wikipedia clone with a Yahoo
Answers clone tacked on. Actually, a much better business model than most
startups...

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jacquesm
All this really shows is that there should be several completely independent
ways of ranking search results which alternate so that it will never pay off
to try to scam them all because the ROI is too small.

Gaming the google ranking system is only effective because of the monoculture.

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slater
Then again, once Google gets wind of this scheme, Mahalo's pages will be
listed somewhere around, oh, page 50.

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
Actually, I've talked to search engine companies about syndicating content
between blogs and they have said over and over again that there is no issue
with this.

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!

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eddycole
"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 ;^)

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aneesh
While this seems like shady tactics from Mahalo, it also seems to suggest the
need for a better (read: less game-able) ranking system than PageRank. There's
now tons more data about which sites users visit for a given query, whether
they return to the results page, how much time they spend on a site, etc. If
you can sift through the noise, it seems like this would be an even more
accurate indicator of site quality than hyperlinks to a page.

~~~
petercooper
Google has already played down the important of PageRank - specifically in a
patent they filed a few years ago. Google for "trustrank".

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jncraton
"if Google lets this slide then many other people are going to start spamming
them too"

Isn't this problem already all over the place?

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pclark
what is Mahalos long term strategy? It just seems to be pages full of links to
other content..

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ashleyw
Copying bigger companies? <http://www.mahalo.com/answers>

Don't get me wrong, sometimes 'copying' is great when somebody truly believes
they can solve a problem better, but that doesn't seem the case here — the
only new feature I see is that you can add a bounty to your question; other
than that, I see no advantage over Yahoo! Answers.

~~~
josefresco
Calacanis' playbook is to add features early and often. Their 'answers'
feature is an example of this. Their long term strategy is all about content,
or pages with aggregated content/links that help people find the content they
need. It's actually a great idea, instead of relying on Google's algorithm
100% to serve the right results, Mahalo is employing people to aggregate the
content.

~~~
nailer
Yahoo's 1994 playbook is to add features early and often. Their 'answers'
feature is an example of this. Their long term strategy is all about content,
or pages with aggregated content/links that help people find the content they
need.

It's actually a great idea, instead of relying on Google's algorithm 100% to
serve the right results, Yahoo in 1994 is employing people to aggregate the
content.

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vaksel
Its kinda funny, if some guy did the same exact thing to increase page rank
for his blog, Google would come down on them hard the second they found out.
Mahalo on the other hand gets a free pass

