I wonder what would happen if Jason just tuned off noindex tags on odd days? Clearly turning it off and on gets more blogs talking about it each time
Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#42[deleted]
Now that you mention it yes, there is supervision. I am it and I forbid you from coming here again. ;)
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#43FWIW, these pages have been removed from Duck Duck Go for quite some time.
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't particularly care about Calacanis (sorry Jason) but I'd say gaming Google this thoroughly is pretty newsworthy. Or at least it was the first three times we read about it.
What's amazing, to me, is that we're still reading about it several months into the story. Mahalo is a known black hat spam site, with despicable tactics, and Google continues to apologize on Calacanis' behalf and send traffic to Mahalo. I think that's actually the interesting part of the story: How Calacanis has snowed so many smart and decent people into doing his bidding.
I'm only speculating (which is dubious at best) but there are 2 probable reasons why Calacanis continues to get away with it.
1) Sequoia funded both Mahalo and Google, so there's probably some leeway granted to Mahalo in that respect
or (my personal favourite)
2) People can get away with a lot more if they're in the public eye and are loud about it. Think OJ Simpson... Calacanis is definitely one that shouts a lot louder than most to get his point across.
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#45Malhalo is starting to remind me of that (was it a Canadian) company who was making all that money off of pay-per-click arbitrage between to search/ad networks, and then one day, Google cut them off cold turkey. Who were they?
GeoSign.
This is the thing. The huge spotlight that guys like Aaron Wall are pointing at Mahalo right now I'm sure is making Calacanis and Co sweating bullets. For big cases like this, it's often a matter of managing perceptions and Google may definitely take action if the story becomes big enough.
The thing is, there are quite a few sites that really skirt the edge of what is acceptable. When these sites/companies are somewhat larger with lots of employees and contractors, well the effect of 'blacklisting' can affect A LOT of people's lives in a very bad way.
For the independent blackhatter, some spam side-site they spin off isn't their livelihood and won't ruin them if banned. Mahalo (and ilk) isn't just a technical matter. Of course if this story gets bigger and Google doesn't do something about it, then this sets a bad precedent for the spam-community to try and game Google. Sure Google will figure ways to deal with it, but if you're the guy dealing with the spam... well, you'd just rather it not exist from the beginning.
I'm really interested to see how this all plays out. From Google's side, Mahalo's side, etc. It's riveting stuff actually.
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#46Shame on Google algorithms for not automatically being able to detect a page without content. Over the years, my view of the Google's ranking algorithms went from dream-like (they are so smart they understand everything) to infant-like (just a bunch of keyword counters). Obviously there has to be huge complexity involved, so my current view must be pessimistic, but still... Just one (unrelated) example: search for "l…
Interestingly, Googling your string, in quotes gives only ads and your post. ;-)
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#47FWIW, these pages have been removed from Duck Duck Go for quite some time.
Did you have to manually cull results from Mahalo, or did your algorithm discard them automatically?
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#48When will we stop hearing about Calacanis and Mahalo? The only thing I take away from the whole thing is how effective manipulating search engines can be. And I already knew this. From blackhat SEOs. The only thing the blackhats haven't taught me is how to get into the Google index and stay there - how are you doing it, Calacanis?
This is getting a little silly I agree. I guess the SEOs are not going to stop so we're all going to have to suffer as they create spam pages in Mahalo and then point to them and say "Calacanis allows spam!"
Update:
1. Did we have show short pages in Mahalo? Yes.
2. How did they get there? Our users start topic pages and don't finish them.
3. Were they getting traffic? Not really... like 4. Why does this keep coming up with the SEOs? Because I called SEO bullsh#$t back in 2005 when someone asked me at a conference why Engadget and Joystiq were doing so well with SEO.
5. Do you still think SEO is bullshit? No, I don't. Back then I didn't know what SEO was and assumed it was spamming google so I said, "oh, that's bs." This was true at the time. At Weblogs Inc. we did zero SEO and we had amazing search traffic. Why? Well, it was later explained to me that we made a lot of content (20 posts a day across 50 blogs = a lot of posts), we got a lot of comments on them and we used keywords in the titles of the posts before anyone else used them. Today's I don't think SEO is BS. I think SEO is an essential part of building any startup just like building a viral loop, doing PR or hiring great people.
6. Are you sorry to the SEO community for hurting their feelings. Yes, I'm really really sorry.
7. I found a page that has no content on it? yes, that will happen from time to time... when we find them we delete, redirect or expand them. These will be in the 8. don't you have tools to do that? yes and no. we're building them. we need to balance turning off pages people are planning on building out vs. ones that are abandoned. So, you will see nofollow on pages with no content, and no follow on pages with That's it... there is nothing bad going on here. We're good people doing good work. Hundreds of people are making real money to take care of their families at Mahalo and I wish you guys would stop attacking them.
If you're pissed at me take it out on me, leave Mahalo out of it.
.... or don't. Who cares. This is so biased and absurd right now I don't think any is really taking it seriously any more. Aaron had a handful of good points last month, but now folks are just doing this to linkbait for their SEO sites.
great... trust me, this is making my experience reading HN annoying too. If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it. Clearly the system here is being abused.
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#49When will we stop hearing about Calacanis and Mahalo? The only thing I take away from the whole thing is how effective manipulating search engines can be. And I already knew this. From blackhat SEOs. The only thing the blackhats haven't taught me is how to get into the Google index and stay there - how are you doing it, Calacanis?
This is getting a little silly I agree. I guess the SEOs are not going to stop so we're all going to have to suffer as they create spam pages in Mahalo and then point to them and say "Calacanis allows spam!" Update: 1. Did we have show short pages in Mahalo? Yes. 2. How did they get there? Our users start topic pages and don't finish them. 3. Were they getting traffic? Not really... like 4. Why does this keep coming…
Jason, you are actually full of crap. For starters, you are mistaken, or pretending not to know, as to why this keeps happening to you. You brought this on yourself, and on Mahalo.com, by unsubtle spamming and boasting about it, and then being rude to boot. You can whine all you want about the perceived injustice of people calling you on your crap, but the fact remains it is your actions that are getting called out, nothing more and nothing less.
This isn't about a small handful of pages that don't have content on them, and if you read the posts you were rebutting instead of trying so damn hard to make yourself sound better then you might actually have information you could use to improve your site.
The vast majority of the pages on Mahalo are empty pages devoid of human generated content. It is not like I am straining my ass off to find them, either. Click on this link, scroll down the page, click through to 20-30 pages (the ones with all lower case titles demonstrate what I am talking about most often, focus on those), and LOOK AT YOUR WEBSITE:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&...
In order to appease Matt Cutts, who gave you the courtesy of warning you instead of banning you outright, you did in fact add noindex to all of those pages. 1 day later, after he saw that it was there, you removed it again.
Pretending not to know what is being talked about and making shit up in an attempt to garner pity for being picked on is not helping your cause any.
Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is getting a little silly I agree. I guess the SEOs are not going to stop so we're all going to have to suffer as they create spam pages in Mahalo and then point to them and say "Calacanis allows spam!" Update: 1. Did we have show short pages in Mahalo? Yes. 2. How did they get there? Our users start topic pages and don't finish them. 3. Were they getting traffic? Not really... like 4. Why does this keep coming…
Jason, you are actually full of crap. For starters, you are mistaken, or pretending not to know, as to why this keeps happening to you. You brought this on yourself, and on Mahalo.com, by unsubtle spamming and boasting about it, and then being rude to boot. You can whine all you want about the perceived injustice of people calling you on your crap, but the fact remains it is your actions that are getting called out,…
I agree, Jason at least address the points being discussed..