What's with Danny Sullivan's and searchenginelands's crusade against Mahalo? Is it just blogsphere link-bait or is there a reason for all this attention on their questionable business model?
It's kind of a combined attack from anyone in the SEO space.
Mahalo was built up going by Google's search guidelines and has made itself an authority online. They're at a level where almost anything they publish gets picked up immediately and ranks fairly well in the SERPs. What they're doing currently are practicing grey/black hat tactics of which almost all are frowned upon by Google (ie. acting as a content scraper with no original content). Because of this authority they've built before, they currently get away with it.
Small sites would be banned or punished for some of the things they're doing, but they haven't even received a slap on the wrist.
Another reason this gets a lot of us SEOs fired up is because Mahalo is doing the same thing Jason preached against. He called everyone in the SEO industry a scumbag and preached about how Mahalo would put SEOs out of business with their 'human powered search'. Mahalo as a destination site failed so they switched to become (essentially) an article directory who get most of their traffic organically through search. The problem is they're creating low value pages with nothing but ads and scraped content. Those pages are what Jason claimed he wanted to get rid of in the first place, one of the reasons he started Mahalo.
The SEO community is pissed about this because it gives us a bad name, building on the bad PR we got when Jason went on this gigantic anti-SEO campaign a couple years back. We're just trying to point out the hypocrisy here and the only way to do that is to present our argument and hope that Google hears us.
