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Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

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Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#61

Post by mvandemar »

utnick wrote: post #11

The spam page example given in the article is: http://www.mahalo.com/aaronwall Question: how does somebody end up at this spam page? Google seems to do a good job of filtering stuff like this. It wasn't in the first 10 or so pages of search results for "aaron wall"

Sorry I did not answer your question earlier. I used that particular page in the post because it was an example of how these autogenerated pages come into being in the first place, from a post I did back when I first called Jason on the practice. It was the actual page that I had seen the noindex tag on after Jason added it. You can get to any of these autogenerated pages by running a query on Mahalo itself.

It was never an issue of how many of the empty pages were ranking per se (although quite a few do, just not that one), but rather of the sheer numbers of them that were collecting enough tiny quantities of of PageRank each, that was then (and is still, as a matter of fact) adding up to massive amounts of self-sustaining ranking power:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/2010/02/22/apparently-j...

I hope that helps.

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#62

Post by jasonmcalacanis »

mvandemar wrote: post #49
jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #48

Earlier 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,…

as I've said, all these pages are being deleted, redirected or built out.

also, the no index thing is going to be on all pages under 100 original words.

we are working as fast as we can to resolve all these stubs, but many are owned by users and we don't want to just nuke them.... so, we're busy at work.

thanks for the feedback....

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#63

Post by mvandemar »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #62
mvandemar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

as I've said, all these pages are being deleted, redirected or built out. also, the no index thing is going to be on all pages under 100 original words. we are working as fast as we can to resolve all these stubs, but many are owned by users and we don't want to just nuke them.... so, we're busy at work. thanks for the feedback....

The noindex tags were there... you took them out again as soon as Matt Cutts looked at the pages. If you want to be taken seriously, maybe you can address that issue instead of calling me a troll for bringing it up.

Also, if you are going to attack me and make accusations about what is being written, could you please at least have the courtesy to actually read the stuff first?

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#64

Post by tdm911 »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #62
mvandemar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

as I've said, all these pages are being deleted, redirected or built out. also, the no index thing is going to be on all pages under 100 original words. we are working as fast as we can to resolve all these stubs, but many are owned by users and we don't want to just nuke them.... so, we're busy at work. thanks for the feedback....

Have the goal posts moved again Jason?

i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143512

or

we're removing (or building out) any page in our system created by our users with under 200 words of original content. This will take a couple of weeks but it's tarted.

from: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144174

and now 100 words?

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#65

Post by niyazpk »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #62
mvandemar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

as I've said, all these pages are being deleted, redirected or built out. also, the no index thing is going to be on all pages under 100 original words. we are working as fast as we can to resolve all these stubs, but many are owned by users and we don't want to just nuke them.... so, we're busy at work. thanks for the feedback....

Awwwww..this is so cute, Jason!

I have a mental picture of you and your engineers trying hard for months in vain to add no-index to all those pages.

Don't worry any more. I am here. Here is the code. Copy paste and everything will be fine:

  if(content.length
Let me know if there is anything that needs to be explained. (I can talk to your engineers if needed)

Peace and Love

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#66

Post by beilabs »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #48
omarchowdhury wrote: post #3

When 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…

Afraid I only agree with one thing above:

"If HN wants to filter out "calacanis" and "mahalo" from HN i'm all for it."

Hear Hear!

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#67

Post by jfarmer »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #14
jaxc wrote: post #10

If Mahalo is alleged to be a scraper site then just let Google handle it. If you think about, if Google delists the site then thats probably their business model gone because Google is like 60% of search Market in the US and higher else where so if Google delists them and take away their Adsense then they are in trouble. So let them taunt Google all they like and then see what happens when the Google Dragon wakes up…

Aaron is basically acting as their Ombudsman right now. Google will probably lose some serious revenue from that, because they get a big cut of what Mahalo generates. If Google lost that ad revenue for some other reason, the person responsible might well be fired for it. When Aaron Wall hounds them over it, they'll be more likely to make the right decision.

Google does something like $18Bn per year in revenue and of that about $750MM-$1Bn is from ads on non-Google-run sites.

So, I think they care about Mahalo as a source of revenue about >< that much. They're probably more worried about possible anti-trust actions if they just drop Mahalo -- I bet that would shave more off their market cap than losing Mahalo as a customer.

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#68

Post by jacquesm »

krakensden wrote: post #29
alain94040 wrote: post #4

Shame 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…

The problem is that PageRank was a beautiful solution that pretty accurately modeled the web, as long as no one knew about PageRank.

In electronics it is a well known fact that it is impossible to measure a system without influencing it.

I think is no way you could ever build a successful search engine ranking algorithm that will not influence the web to the point where that algorithm will lose a lot of its initial edge.

Re: Mahalo's disappearing noindex tags

#70

Post by prawn »

vaksel wrote: post #26
houseabsolute wrote: post #22

Posted this over on that blog, but I thought it might be interesting to HN readers too: I also noticed this snippet of code: if(url.indexOf(”google.”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”search.yahoo”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”search.live”)!=-1||url.indexOf(”bing.”)!=-1){ if($(”#adsense_2719325″).parents(”#right-column”).length > 0 && !isImage){ $(”#adsense_2719325″).addClass(”afc_wide”); } $(”#adsense_2719325″).html(ads); $(”#ads-section-27…

showing/hiding ads is perfectly fine. What you can't do is use that to keyword stuff your site.

On one of my sites, I used AdSense channels to learn more about the CTR from those arriving from Google vs regular users of the site. The CTR from incoming Google traffic was 10x higher, so I show ads to that traffic but not to the regulars - keeps them happier.
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