

Fed up with Mahalo's search engine spam? Report it here - tomh-
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1

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swombat
I have yet to stumble upon a single Mahalo answer page in any of my search
queries. Maybe I'm not interested in the right topics.

~~~
nailer
I have - I play about two videogames a year, stickign to things that are rated
97% by most magazines (ie, the few that are really worth playing). Looking for
BioShock info I ended up at an original-content-free Mahalo link page.

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chaosmachine
I'd never really had a problem with Mahalo showing up in my results, until
yesterday. I Googled my name, and found they were scraping my content and
hosting it under a page with my name as the title and url. Yuck.

~~~
raganwald
So far they're ignoring me. I guess I'll know I've "made it" when scum-sucking
web parasites start feeding off my internet blood.

~~~
jasonkester
For a long time, everything I wrote would get re-blogged by dozens of spammy
blogs all across the internet, occasionally with the odd misspelling thrown in
to simulate original content.

My solution was to become less interesting.

~~~
raganwald
Me too!

<http://homoiconic.com>

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madair
I see way more links about Mahalo on Hacker News than to Mahalo on Google
Search.

When I search for a topic for which a Wikipedia ranks highly, I see articles
that link to wikipedia.org.

Like many people here, I search, perhaps, hundreds of times per day. (Hmm,
that's a stat I should keep).

Something smells fishy.

~~~
stingraycharles
_Like many people here, I search, perhaps, hundreds of times per day. (Hmm,
that's a stat I should keep)_

Don't worry, Google already does that for you:

<https://www.google.com/history/>

~~~
madair
They may do it, but:

(1) I don't use Google Toolbar, which is required for that to work (

2) I'm trying to wean myself away from Google for everything by dividing my
usage out to other search engines

A single vendor solution for something so private and important is
undesirable, on general principals. It's a small step, but an important one,
at least to me.

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vaksel
people have reported them through that page countless of times before, which
already caused Google to talk to them.

Remember a few days ago there was a post about how Mahalo added noindex to the
crap pages for a few days while Matt Cutts was looking at it, and then removed
it as soon as he gave them a green flag

I doubt anything will happen unless something big happens. I dunno maybe a
class action lawsuit by all the spammers who got banned by Google. Something
like "Google is using it's monopoly power to crush competition for it's
partners from whom they get a cut of the revenue and for whom they don't
enforce the rules".

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Willie_Dynamite
To be honest, I'm more fed up with the constant handwringing about them over
here. I've never even heard of them outside of here, and I've never seen them
in my search results.

~~~
pkaler
I see them in results a few times a day. Quantcast has them as number 167:
<http://www.quantcast.com/mahalo.com>

------
viraptor
On a slightly related topic: I'm always wondering if I should report another
page that way... swik.net seems to at least try to be legit, but all they do
is capture common opensource searches (for example googling "sip yate" gives
swik.net/yate+sip) and then display loads of links to other services, without
any added value.

Does anyone know if they provide any real services?

~~~
rapind
I get osdir coming up constantly, regurgitating mailing lists and forums with
tons of ad spam.

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tomh-
For example:
[http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=site:mahalo.com+%22T...](http://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&q=site:mahalo.com+%22This+page+adopted+from+Wikipedia%22&btnG=Zoeken&meta=&aq=f&oq=)

shows 28k duplicate content pages of wikipedia, this is a valid Google query
and a valid reason to report them.

~~~
daeken
So when you search for Wikipedia articles at mahalo.com, you get... Wikipedia
articles at mahalo.com? The case would be stronger if you could show searching
for "Foo" to come up with the Foo Wikipedia page at mahalo.com above Wikipedia
itself.

~~~
tomh-
This is incredibly hard. Most likely they won't rank for the exact same
Wikipedia topic, but for more specific queries like "foo bar widget spam other
term". Most likely due to the combination of all their scraped content.
Google's duplicate content detection is definitely not rock solid and thats
why these sites are working. For years in the past and for years to come.

So if a user searches for "foo" he lands on wikipedia, if he wants to get more
specific and searches for "foo bar widget spam other term" he lands on the
mahalo duplicate content page, again with the same content. Because user
research (Don't make me think - Steve Krugs) has shown that if users do not
find what they are looking for, they look for the fastest way out. The fastest
way out is through all ads placed on Mahalo and thats why they make money.

I hope you and everyone else now sees that all of these pages who make a
little impact on their own but a big one on the whole are decreasing the
quality of Google's index. And because these terms are so specific its hard
(and pointless) to point them out specifically. If you are in Google's index,
you rank for some terms, else you wouldn't be indexed, this query conveniently
points out all spammy pages on Mahalo so Google can take appropriate
action....unless they actually give Mahalo a different treatment than all
those other spam sites.

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rrhyne
Not sure what the anti Mahalo campaign is all about. Why is there no anti
expert-exchange campaign. That paywall shouldn't be anywhere near the top of a
single google search.

~~~
raganwald
> Why is there no anti expert-exchange campaign

 _Because Jeff Atwood actually did something about it_ , he founded
StackOverflow specifically to drive them off the top results for programming
questions.

------
niyazpk
I suspect that the number of people actually reporting Mahalo as spam may be
way less than expected. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect>

~~~
romland
While I agree that the number of people reporting this may be less than you
think, linking to that Wikipedia article is a bit overly dramatic, isn't it?
It's about playing some algorithm on some website...

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boycottmahalo
i just reported a bunch of pages. i hate Jason Calacanis's shady bussiness
practices and employees exploitation.

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dangrossman
Searched "dragon age origins walkthrough" a month or so ago when I was playing
the game.

Mahalo's page "Dragon Age Origins Walkthrough" is on the first page of
results. It contains zero walkthrough content. There is a placeholder
paragraph that reads "This section of the Guide Note should include two or
three sentences about the actor and the role they are best known for
playing"... like instructions for someone to make said page.

No content, just tons of ads.

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jasonwilk
Im building a search engine that doesn't index Mahalo pages. It will be called
aWorldWithoutMattCutts.com/awesome

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unwind
This seems to require a separate login, to "Google Webmaster Tools".

~~~
jasonkester
It's just your google account.

Strange, I would have expected pretty much everybody here at HN to have their
own sites, and therefore use Google's Webmaster Tools on a regular basis.

------
jrockway
Fed up with articles whining about Mahalo on HN? Report it here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/r?fnid=ymjIDn84Or>

