

How long has Mahalo been using keyword domains like this? - kbrower
http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl:tip_guidelines+mahalo&hl=en&filter=0

======
swirlee
Contrary to what these initial comments are suggesting, Mahalo isn't
duplicating content across all of these sites. These sites are each targeted
at specific verticals, and (are intended to) only have questions and answers
related to that vertical. It's a strategy that worked for Calacanis at
Weblogs, Inc. (to a degree--eventually a lot of superniche blogs were
shuttered or consolidated into the higher-profile brands) and I suspect it'll
work again.

As for Google's rankings, I don't think these sites are any worse off than the
Stack Exchange sites, which all share the same basic design and markup and
many of the same boilerplate About, etc. pages.

Is it great for users, i.e. people actually trying to find answers? Well,
that's an open question. I think ultimately it is because someone looking for
FarmVille answers (yes, Mahalo has such a site, and yes, an incredible number
of people have FarmVille questions) is going to get more relevant results than
they'll find on Mahalo Answers proper. If these sites didn't exist would they
find better, or faster, answers to their questions? I think sometimes they
would, sometimes they wouldn't. Generally answers on Mahalo Answers are
higher-quality than, say, Yahoo! Answers, which I see showing up in the
results for many of my Google searches.

I don't blame anyone for disliking the practice--it does have a bit of a smell
--but I do think it's a good business decision for Calacanis et al.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Jason Calacanis at Weblogs, Inc. and Propeller
(nee Netscape.com) and enjoyed the experience. I haven't talked to him in a
couple years but I bet if I called him up he'd do me a solid. Oh, I was also
an early Mahalo beta-tester and use Mahalo Answers once every couple of
months.)

------
micheljansen
I think calling these these kinds of practices "Search Engine Optimisation" is
a little perverse. "Search Engine Deception" would be a better term. This is
precisely the sort of thing that makes SEO such as shady business nowadays. It
might work for now, but it's still a hack based on the current implementation
of search engines that will likely be punished later on.

~~~
Aaronontheweb
Personally this kind of practice doesn't bother me, but if it bothers you then
you can probably send Matt Cutts an email about it - his entire job role is to
eliminate this kind of noise out of Google's rankings.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Matt Cutts is completely aware of everything Mahalo does, if from nothing else
than the constant threads on HN.

~~~
jcalacanis
Ain't that the truth! I've got 10 or so SEOs who watch everything we do and
send complaint letters by the dozens to Matt.

Keeps us on our toes to an absurd level.

~~~
aaronwall
The question is, do you feel you deserve such exposure? How did you manage to
earn it? Was it what you were hoping for?

I hope your search traffic is up, in spite of what third party metrics tools
are showing ;)

I will give you this... nfl-answers.com was (almost) a great Hail Mary
strategy ;)

~~~
jcalacanis
If you want to obsess about me please continue... all your doing is making
yourself look bad. It's silly to obsess to this level about one person. The
Hacker News community is now looking at the account AaronWall as a spammer--
way to go!

In terms of traffic we took a little hit when we removed the shorter pages,
and we actually have a higher benchmark than anyone in the content space about
what we index--and the search engines know this. We only rank stuff--on
average--when it's 300 words or more. This means we have a much higher
benchmark than About.com, Wikipedia and Google Knol.

we got this suggestion from you and it's actually concentrated our page rank
to the high-quality, higher CPM pages.... the end result? When we removed the
low quality pages our revenue grew 2.5x!!!

You are responsible for, literally, millions of dollars in revenue for
Mahalo.... for that I think your tollish ways!

Sidenote: I've apologized to the SEO community a million times for saying SEO
is BS. you're the one who won't get over it. Keep wasting everyone's time with
your non-sense while I create more companies, invest in more companies and
getting more stacks.

My life is unfairly epic, and your life is spent obsessing about that
fact..... sad dude. really. The most attention and achievement you'll have in
your sad little life is when you're throwing rocks at me. Sad.

~~~
aaronwall
As long as you _feel_ important I suppose that is all that matters. Self-
aggrandizing for the win.

The funny thing about your presumption is that you don't realize how much web
traffic I control, or that I was able to grow a similar sized traffic stream
without bilking investors & without looting third party content without
permission or opt out & without cybersquatting.

You take the low road & I'll take the high one.

No matter how many times you use the word _troll_ it won't change _the facts_.
;)

------
volomike
This is autoblogging. This won't work. Google will see the blog theme
fingerprint and will either lessen the index or de-index. Also, the dupe
content is another factor that gets you de-indexed.

Now if they used a generic, common theme, and different themes; and then if
they used unique, synonymized content -- these things would perhaps get past
the Google filter unless of course something triggers a manual review at
Google and a human checks it.

A site has flags at Google (that's the theory) and if you throw enough flags,
then it sometimes triggers an automatic de-index or PR lessening. In some
cases, and again this is all theory, it triggers a manual review and they have
a human review what's going on to see if they need to alert the core team on a
search engine tweak.

~~~
davidu
It's lame, but what they are doing is not exactly auto-blogging. They are
driving traffic (eventually) to Mahalo.

~~~
jcalacanis
Actually, we're not trying to drive folks to Mahalo with these sites. We're
actually happier if they stay on the vertical sites--which have higher CPMs.

------
Ummmmm
Jason sits here and tries to claim there is nothing wrong with registering
trademarks in domains when about a month ago, Mahalo lost a domain to
StateFarm because Mahalo had violated their trademark.

<http://domains.adrforum.com/domains/decisions/1317317.htm>

So Jason, did you not know you had lost a domain or are you flat out lying
about your knowledge of how trademarks and domains work?

~~~
aaronwall
At some point, doesn't a person who consistently ends up on the wrong side of
_the truth_ end up losing the benefit of the doubt?

My guess is Jason was hoping nobody would find that. ;)

------
jamesk2
Is there actually a benefit from doing this for Mahalo? Wouldn't google just
recognize that their content is duped all over the place?

~~~
noodle
mahalo seems to be reasonably smart with their SEO trickery. i'd guess that
they tested it and found benefits.

~~~
jonknee
No no, you have it all wrong. Jason said he doesn't know anything about SEO
and just happens to accidentally stumble on all the techniques (then
apologizes but doesn't stop using them).

------
jergason
Can someone explain what exactly this is and why it is bad? I am not very
well-versed in the Google-fu.

~~~
mahmud
Mahalo registered hundreds of domain names that are actual search queries to
improve their search ranking. For example, when Mahalo discovered that people
searched for "Car Repair" enough times, Mahalo registered "CarRepair.com" and
ended up the first result in google search from that point onward, because
google regards the domains that match the query very highly.

Then they repeated this for hundreds of other queries.

This is considered bad form because these shell websites are all
indistinguishable in terms of substance, and duplicate content already offered
by the main site.

~~~
jcalacanis
Some updates for folks on SEO:

1\. Domain names are not counted toward SEO. Links and quality content are
what drives SEO. That is what you should really focus on.

2\. Having more than one domain name doesn't help SEO--especially if they are
all on the same group of servers. Google knows when one person owns all the
same domain names and when they are all on the same servers. If you wanted to
try and fool google you might be able to have 500 servers in 500 different
locations running 500 different software profiles, etc. However, the amount of
time to do that is greater than just making good content.

3\. Putting keyword in a domain just makes it easier to remember. Which is
worthwhile...

~~~
randfish
Jason - I think the data would beg to differ. Correlation of exact match
domains and even of domains that simply include the keywords with high
rankings on both Google and Bing are quite pronounced -
[http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-
analys...](http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-
ranking-elements) \- particularly for algorithms that supposedly contain 200+
ranking elements.

I agree with Aaron that a keyword-rich domain can be a great asset and benefit
from an SEO perspective, but I find it hard to believe that you
approved/initiated this strategy without some knowledge of the SEO benefits
and intention to reap the rewards. Either way, glad to see you helping to
spread the concepts and success SEO can bring rather than bash it - that's
certainly a welcome change :-)

I don't have any type of legal background, so don't feel qualified to speak to
the legalities of employing trademarks in domain names.

------
noodle
based on the age of my random selection of those domain names, they started
doing it early this year.

------
rubyrescue
There are two things going on here.

1\. Generating domains that match exact search terms is very common and can be
quite effective. This is not 'bad' in google ethics - think of how there is no
search bar in chrome - when i type 'hacker news' into chrome, hackernews.com
is #3; the line between a search and almost typing in an exact domain name
makes these domains valuable, and uneducated users who don't know the
difference between a search and a domain mean this won't change anytime soon.

2\. Mahalo could be auto-generating content that should be penalized because
it is duplicate or spammy. This is, within the terms of the googleverse, 'bad'
and can be penalized. However it's not clear that all of those sites are
exactly the same (i didn't click through each one) - they may be different
enough but just share a similar URL structure, which if the content is
different, is not really an issue.

------
terrellm
So not only are they content thieves, they are also cybersquatters with names
like:

    
    
      starwarsanswers.com
      iphoneqna.com
      facebook-questions.com
      nfl-questions.com
      squarespaceanswer.scom
      astonmartinanswers.com
      volkswagenanswers.com
    

And that's just the first 2 pages of results.

~~~
aaronwall
Buying great domain names is just a great/smart/effective strategy.

But cybersquatting isn't something where a person is operating in the gray
area of the terms of service, it is something which is clearly ___illegal_ __.

Now that is something you might expect some low end affiliate to do, or maybe
an innocent technique by a person ignorant to what they are doing (if they are
doing it on just 1 name)...but to raise venture capital and then deploy it on
illegal marketing strategies is a bit extreme.

It would have been nearly as helpful/beneficial to do something like
footballquestions.com (instead of nfl-questions.com), and it wouldn't have
been illegal.

The curious question is why take VC money if you want to take the low road? Do
the investors realize the latent risk embedded in this activity?

Jason claimed that the Youtube founders should have handed their sales money
to the original content creators. I wonder if he thinks the same way about
money made from JASON cybersquatting on someone else's brand?

And I would love to here Jason explain how/why he feels the 2 are in any way
different from each other.

~~~
jcalacanis
Actually Aaron, you can use a domain name with a brand in it.... take a look
at wipo and you'll see dozens of examples of this. I've posted one below.

That being said, if someone had a problem with our Toyota Answers site or iPad
Answers site we would discuss it with them.

Not sure that you understand what the term Cybersquatting means.
Cybersquatting is when you sit on a domain name that is the same as someone's
brandname and you try to sell it back to them.

What we are doing is creating a forum for the public to discuss a product or
service. We also take the time to do a popup to keep people from being
confused.

There are many internet companies that do this including the publicly traded
Internet Brands which runs sites like corvetteforum.com.

Here's the Wipo link for you to get caught up...

best jcal

[http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000...](http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2000/d2000-1015.html)
Based on the foregoing discussion, the Panel denies the Complaint under the
Policy 4 (i) and the Rules 15. Complainant, Lockheed Martin Corporation,
failed to show that the disputed domain names were confusingly similar to its
trademarks. Therefore, the Panel orders that the disputed domain names
<lockheedsucks.com> and <lockheedmartinsucks.com> remain registered in the
name of the Respondent, Dan Parisi.

~~~
volomike
I recently googled ugg boots and found that the lawyers for UGG told Google to
de-index some sites that had ugg in the domain name. That's uncool.

I knew a guy who had "timex" somewhere in his domain name and the lawyers for
Timex did a cease-and-desist on him.

These trademark and IP lawyers are crossing the line because they know they
can go after small-time operators who can't afford the legal team to fight
them. And then that sets a legal precedent of a long series of wins that gives
trademark and IP lawyers more ammo to use on even more cases, like a snowball.

------
mikerhoads
Disclaimer: I worked for Mahalo last year.

You guys are over estimating the value of the domain names. They is a reason
they were able to mass register these domains for just the base registration
fee and not have to haggle with any private owners for a transfer. ____
answers is not a popular search query. I doubt any of domains are queries that
generate more tha 500 searches a month. These domains have no value unless
niche communities form around them and long tail content is generated as a
result.

~~~
prawn
If your domain is costing you $10/year or less, and your content is a one-off,
automated or crowdsourced, you only need a few cents/day to cover costs or
edge into a tiny profit.

If you rank top for that keyword, 70% or so may click through. Most ads will
pay at least a couple of cents, but could be higher. (I have a couple of
static, set-and-forget sites where the domain registration for the year is
paid by the first few ad clicks to arrive.)

When you have 500 searches/month plus some longer tail stuff, it will do
better than many suspect.

In my experience, the 'ideas' suffix is also underrated (less competition for
domains, decent niche to tackle) as incoming traffic is seeking a result and
will often click an ad to get that.

------
mkramlich
that's pretty scummy

