I guess this is in direct response to Matt Cutts openly pointing Mahalo on HN. We should make the Aaron Wall the real SEO police. Just read the seobook blog and you will see all the sneaky things sites like Mahalo and ehow does.
Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
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Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#12I think they see the "content mill penalty" writing on the wall and are pivoting to spamming YouTube in advance.
You are right, Google is gearing to change its algorithm to start penalize pages instead of sites. Good sites with few bad pages will see that not all their pages are ranked. Whereas bad sites with few good pages will see that only their good pages are bringing traffic. So maybe this could be a nice motivation for bad sites to add more good pages.
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#13I was ready to say mahalo was the biggest spam website on the internet last week after the whole google search debate but now I think mahalo may have a killer product. right now it's like wikipedia 2.0 .... so far I like the 4.0 version ...maybe I'm wrong but I like this pivot
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#14Does anybody here use Mahalo? What are some use-cases where it makes sense?
EDIT:
So I checked out the new Mahalo's advertised feature, "How to Convert Fractions":
http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-convert-fractions/
They have a video which is pretty good. (I wonder if creating hi-quality videos scales to satisfy investors?) Then they have the steps in the video in text format with words such as "Fraction" hyperlinked to a spammy Mahalo page:
Below this content they have "Related" stuff like "How to convert fractions - XXX" where XXX = {Videos, Images, Newsfeed, Twitter}. These are {Google, Bing, Twitter, etc} auto-generated spam/noise and contain no useful information. (You can't auto-generate a sensible feed about converting fractions.)
Overall I'd rate the new mahalo.com as spammy. The videos + transcribed text may be good, but there's too much surrounding crap.
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#15Does anybody here use Mahalo? What are some use-cases where it makes sense? EDIT: So I checked out the new Mahalo's advertised feature, "How to Convert Fractions": http://www.mahalo.com/how-to-convert-fractions/ They have a video which is pretty good. (I wonder if creating hi-quality videos scales to satisfy investors?) Then they have the steps in the video in text format with words such as "Fraction" hyperlinked to…
I was going to ask the same question because the only times I ever hear about Mahalo is from people who complain about how they are spamming. Haven't heard from a single user of the service yet.
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#16If Mahalo has been such a loved product with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 why are they basically scrapping all of it and releasing a new product? It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that. Oh right if you pivot it's okay.
Why do they cling to that brand? I've only heard about it here, and the opinions were unanimously negative.
I'm sure I'm not in their target demographics, though. Who do they appeal to?
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#17A fun side-story: There was a question on Quora recently - "Why did Duck Duck Go Block Mahalo.com?" and Jason Calacanis, of course, felt it necessary to weigh in. I had to read this response twice, assuming there was some intended irony:
"if they did that is a big mistake... we are not close to spam and a we have the best articles on many things like how to play guitar, speak french, etc."
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#18If Mahalo has been such a loved product with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 why are they basically scrapping all of it and releasing a new product? It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that. Oh right if you pivot it's okay.
They haven't scraped it at all, they've just evolved the product a bit. I think the new designation is more showmanship then "pivot"
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#19The problem with all these pivots is that Jason never addresses the real problem looking for a solution:
The Problem: How do you couple an ad based funding model to user generated content without having that content model destroyed by ads displayed not in content of content and ads and ad frequency not fitting with user generated content.
Thee is the problem Jason and you still have not solved go back to the drawing board!
And to be fair I do not know if there is solution to the problem with a non-volunteer human infrastructure...maybe there is not one.
Re: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning
#20I know the HN community has mixed feelings (at best) about Mahalo, but definitely watch the video!
When I saw Mahalo in the title I almost skipped the article completely, but Jason provides a solid dissection of his company's evolution and the strategic mistakes they've made so far. (Plus it's pretty short.)
(Skip the Mahalo promo at the end.)