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Spam vs Mahalo: Matt Cutts Explains the Difference
- melvinram 17y agoMatt Cutts surely can't ignore this debate for much longer. The least he could do is chime in with Google's official perspective on the situation whether it's for or against the Mahalo approach.
- shawndrost 17y agoIt looks like he's unable to comment at the moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143911 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143911
- keltex 17y agoThat's not the real Matt Cutts
- boundlessdreamz 17y agoThe real Matt Cutts has said he is aware of the mahalo problem. see this http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/9513414423 http://twitter.com/mattcutts/statuses/9513414423 and the thread.
- zaidf 17y agoFunny. By those standards applied strictly, google's own search result pages would be considered spam. Jason can argue that there is value in the SELECTION of content that is not explicitly visible but nonetheless significant. Similarly, Hacker News homepage might be considered spam because it's mostly titles of articles. Until you take into account the value of the votes--which is value that these google guidelines don't address clearly.
- melvinram 17y agoWell the debate really is how well should Google reward Mahalo for it's practices. Namely, how much ranking Google should (and other search engines) give to Mahalo on it's SERPs (search engine results pages)? I don't think Google's search results or even Hacker News really ever shows up too often on SERPs except for their respective brands... so it doesn't really apply. They are destination websites not focused on search traffic.
- houseabsolute 17y agoAnd you'll notice that Google does not index its own search result pages, nor encourage anyone else to do so. Perhaps "spam" is too pejorative a word and "things that should not be in our search engine" would be a better description.
- newman314 17y agoFor what it's worth, Topsy is doing the same for tweets. I've seen Google show a Topsy search page more than once while searching for things recently. For example, links such as http://topsy.com/s/toyota+grand+jury+subpoena http://topsy.com/s/toyota+grand+jury+subpoena are submitted into google to be indexed.
- newman314 17y agoBacktype does the same too as far as I can tell so there are definitely quite a few companies out there with such activities. This is a bummer as this just serves to increase the noise to the detriment of getting good results.
- bmelton 17y ago"search result pages would be considered spam." I don't think so. It looks like the policy is in place to keep you from having to perform multiple clicks to get where you want. In the common use case (I visit Google.com, type a search, get a result) I do not have to click on anything more than the search result to get where I am going. The difference is in a use case where my search result takes me to a search results page, which means I am only halfway (or less) to my target page after clicking on the Google search result. This doesn't mean, necessarily that all Mahalo content is bad, but that Google shouldn't be indexing Mahalo search results pages, and instead should link directly to the resultant content pages instead (scraped or not.) Similarly, Hacker News articles should not be the result of a search done on the news title (as HN's link to the original article actually increases the article's score, right?), but should perform better if the matched term is found in the HN-specific content (e.g., the commentary we create on HN only.) I'm sure that there are (hopefully) edge cases in which a search for the article title returns the HN link instead of to the original article, but that should be the exception to the rule. Of course, if HN were to have an absurdly high page rank and link to a relatively unknown (or new) blog, it would likely lead to a result on here, instead of the other way 'round.
- melito 17y agoFLAME BAIT IS FLAMING
- melito 17y agoWhile I can understand downing based on my knee jerk immaturity towards this, but is any of this legitimate? Will anyone benefit from having read this article? Are there really that many people interested in this? Are you all really up voting this stuff because you're legitimately interested?
- CoryMathews 17y agopretty much yes.
- codexon 17y agoMany startups here rely on cheap SEO for marketing. If Mahalo (or anyone else with a high PR domain) can outrank everyone else simply by spamming, it's not fair to a nascent startup
- bhp 17y agoAll these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying.
- plinkplonk 17y ago"All these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying" the catfights landing on HN (and getting voted up) is doubly annoying!
- vaksel 17y agoI disagree. Double standards need to be exposed. If you do any of these things that Mahalo is doing, you'd get delisted from Google in no time.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoThey're also important. If Mahalo, Demand Media, etc. all continue to do what they're doing, then they'll have built a publisher-paid paywall around most of the content online. That is bad news for anyone who tries to get long-tail organic search traffic. It's good news for sites with great brand names, but terrible news for anyone else.
- bhp 17y agoThe concept is important, but the personal attacks (link bait) is what I'm referring to, and is unnecessary.
- detst 17y agoPerhaps unnecessary but they certainly draw more attention and increase the likelihood that something will be done.
- bobbyi 17y agoThey are important, but this one didn't really add any new information beyond the ones we've already seen.
- zaidf 17y ago
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agosome of these discussions make a lot of sense for HN as many entrepreneurs here are building businesses around content ie - "what is spam?". This one does not.
- pierrefar 17y agoThis is doing the rounds among SEOs on Twitter: http://www.mahalo.com/search?q=mattcutts%20is%20gay%20and%20wont%20ban%20us http://www.mahalo.com/search?q=mattcutts%20is%20gay%20and%20...
- btipling 17y agoHow much original content is there in Google Reader? Not defending Mahalo, especially if it stealing copyrighted content from other sites, but not having original content doesn't mean you don't provide value. Google Reader has value and no original content.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoIf Google started giving people public Google Reader pages, would you like it if Scoble's Google Reader outranked your blog when people searched for your blog's name? There is value in duplicate content. But there's no value in a search query taking you to a search page, where the site you wanted to land on has to pay Mahalo for adding an extra click between you and what you wanted.
- melvinram 17y agosee http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143489 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1143489
- bobbyi 17y agoAll of google reader is blocked by their robots.txt, exactly like the article is saying mahalo needs to do for their scraped content http://www.google.com/robots.txt http://www.google.com/robots.txt
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jasonmcalacanis 17y agoThis whole thing is insane.... we have "stub" pages just like Wikipedia. These are topic pages that people are working on and THEY DON'T RANK in search engines until they we get the word count to around 300-500 words. We are the process of NOINDEXING the pages that are below 300 words just to make Aaron happy... we actually had these noindexed before our last version and that got lost in the shuffle of the new launch (really, it did... when you do new code you might leave something out of the old code). 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. Anyway, i thank Aaron for busting out chops and making us better! The claims that we are "scraping" are absurd... we're using google, bing, twitter, etc. apis to do a comprehensive search page. i dont know everything about SEO, but i don't understand this claim by Aaron. i think he is trying to start trouble for us... and maybe it will work. Thanks pal!
- lmkg 17y ago> The claims that we are "scraping" are absurd... we're using google, bing, twitter, etc. apis to do a comprehensive search page. Some people would consider that scraping. How do you define "scraping" and how does this practice not fall under the definition?
- sp332 17y agoI think the point is using APIs, not "screen-scraping" - but the end result is mostly the same.
- aaronwall 17y agoA couple clarifications if you don't mind then ;) - If you don't want those pages indexed in Google then why are you submitting them in an XML sitemap? - I have already shown examples of the 0 original content pages ranking, so how can you claim that they do not rank? - You are not scraping directly, you are pulling from 3rd party sites and using it as content on your own site. Which is worse, because there is no way to opt out of it. - My problem is not just with what you call stub pages, but with most of your pages. When you give people embed code to embed your content in their site you give them an iframe AND a direct link back to you. If you want me to stop highlighting the absurdity of it then perhaps you should hold yourself to the same standards as what you offer others. But you do just the opposite when you embed 3rd party content in your site. You slap a nofollow on the links and embed the content directly into the page (rather than in an iframe). - Worth noting that every time I mention the above point you end up talking about stub pages or experiments or some other strategy to try to redirect attention. But in reality, what I am talking about is what you do on almost every page of your website.
- moultano 17y agoIf the title of an article is a question, the answer is no.
- numbchuckskills 17y agoI don't know what you're smoking aaron. I just did a site:mahalo.com and came across http://www.mahalo.com/dumptruckhitsbridge http://www.mahalo.com/dumptruckhitsbridge . What you haven't done with your post is provide an alternative avenue for me to pursue when investigating dump trucks hitting bridges. for shame.
- ashu 17y agoHow can Google NOT look at that sample page Aaron has displayed? That is truly terrible :( Also, Matt Cutts is generally very honest and public, but in this case, uncharacteristically quiet.
- prawn 17y agoIf you visit a page on Mahalo that you think doesn't cut it, be sure to hit the 'Ads by Google' link and send feedback to Google about it.
- NZ_Matt 17y agoThere is a large incentive for google to send traffic to Maholo. The low quality of the pages causes the user to want to exit the page. What do they click on when leaving? the adsense ads! I'm not saying Google are going out of their way to support this but it is easy to see why they may be hesitant to penalize Maholo.
- andrewpbrett 17y ago"I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search."
- maurycy 17y agoDepressing.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- benatlas 17y agoThe internet is only moving in the direction where Google points and Google favors quantity over quality. All Internet problems flow from this Google unstated rule. Google would rather make a cent each on a million stolen pages of crap than $10 on an original content, plus the spam "author" is not going to ask anything for the "content".
- gcb 17y agomanhalo and seo are the reason HN need a friend-foe system like slashdot. Every time you post anything about it, you prove you don't deserve to exist. Or you are a spam bot.