That would be great if Google would forget them. Occasionally I'll search for something and see a Mahalo page that seems to have at least a pointer to what I need, when in reality I'm just inundated with AdSense and the content that seemed to be there either isn't anymore or never was (i.e., it was a crappily autogenerated page that has an intro paragraph seemingly from someone's blog or something with no link or other content).
The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.
Since this issue has been raised many times on HN, could you show the kind
of queries that point back to Mahalo in the results. I use Google
daily but it never happened to me.
Seconding this. After years of heavy googling, I just came upon my first Mahalo page a few days ago. It was in probably the 6th or 7th position on the first page, and gave me the answer I needed.
The pages I get in my Google results from Mahalo seem to be along the same lines as the Experts Exchange pages you get. Annoying pages with crap ads all over them that just clog up your results.
Google should just blacklist the entire domain and be done with it. Do they really provide any value to the Internet at all?
If you scroll to the bottom of the very long Experts Exchange page, the question and answers are down there. While I realize your question was meant to be rhetorical, EE has answered my question a few times, and I want to say that they do provide some value, which I suppose is reflected in its page rank.
Yeah, I realize if you scroll all the way to the bottom and ignore all of the up-selling of premium access, you can see the real answer, but their pages are designed specifically so that you don't notice this and don't bother to scroll so far. I just use Experts Exchange as an example because they seem to be another company that uses SEO gaming techniques to get a PageRank that isn't really justified based on their content.
I'll admit, I have gotten an answer or two from EE, but at the same time I also wonder where they stole the real content from. These companies that do SEO rarely generate any real content themselves. They all violate copyright in flagrant ways.
Alas people who visit Mahalo for no other reason than Jason's linkfarm directed their search their may not hate the site, although the person running the site with real content does.
Take a look at the how to play guitar chords page... it's everything you would want if you did that search.
people stay on that page for 20-60 minutes!!! and there are 50 people on that page all the time learning to play guitar chords. sorry it's not how to set up a cassandra cluster, but it is of value to people learning to do something basic.
Nice. Who did you steal the content from? Or do you just, out of the goodness of your heart, pay a professional guitar player to write content for you and give it away to the Internet for free?
In Jason's defence (I still think he's a scumbag) he pays people to aggregate data from multiple sources. That's about as unethical as writing a paper that cites multiple sources (provided he's actually using a reasonable number of sites and is within fair use).
This, of course, doesn't excuse the fake domains and link farming.
It sounds awesome Jason - so why do you need to register a whole bunch of different domains and point to the content, rather than just acquiring real links, like other sites with valuable content do?
Cool. If that's the case, if they get everything they need from that page, you can safely remove all of the adsense plastered all over the page right? Since people are sitting on that page learning to play chords, and the content is so awesome.
The idea is great (curated knowledge could be a boon for consumers and producers), but I think the way they're doing it sucks.