Jason Calacanis Knows He's Spamming Google, He Just Thinks It's No Big Deal

While it's always a bit annoying to see a meme take up article slots on Hacker News regularly, I don't mind this one. I see sites like Mahalo as doing massive disservice to huge numbers of people --<p>* thousands of AdWords advertisers that have paid for their ads to be matched with content sites, not scraper pages with a huge ad to text ratio<p>* thousands of publishers whose work is being scraped, aggregated and outranked without as much as a backlink<p>* millions of web searchers that are hitting these pages instead of the real sources of the content they were searching for<p>And calling out companies that harm the fabric of the web for everyone else is worth doing.

It's really too bad Google doesn't allow you to simply blacklist domains from your search results permanently. The thing that frustrates me the most about these SPAM sites is the fact they're constantly popping up and my down voting of the result seems to do absolutely nothing unless I'm using the exact same search query. Just let me blacklist Mahalo and other sites like it permanently. Better yet make it possible to subscribe to a blocklist so the community can pool it's resources and fight back.

Jason Calacanis is the Paris Hilton of the web.<p>Mahalo is not particularly interesting, not particularly evil, he doesn't really do anything, and yet - we keep talking about him and putting his shit on the front page of hacker news.<p>It's a mediocre aggregator/linkfarm, with some mechanical turk style incentives for humans to contribute, and a nice chunk of $ in the bank. Just ignore/mock him for another year or two until the funding runs dry.

One of the things I really miss in google is a persistent blocking preference a.k.a. site blacklist. Mahalo would go straight in there, along with expert-sexchange, sedo parking and a few others.

a year on, maybe not so crazy now eh? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485618" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485618</a>

SEO is snake oil. This is further proof that the whole "industry" is ruining the integrity and usefulness of the internet.

&#62;&#62; "Currently when I look, Google tells me that Mahalo has 356,000 pages indexed"<p>I see 'Results 1 - 10 of about 2,200,000 from mahalo.com'<p>Have things stepped up a gear or am I misunderstanding?

this is getting really old and we're not interested in doing anything black hat or even gray hat. as such we're doing the following:<p>1. 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.<p>2. we're not letting users create stub pages (short pages) until we can noindex them and put them in a different directory (i.e. /stubs/) so google can easily tell the difference between them.<p>these pages are &#60; 1% of our revenue and low single digits of our traffic. we don't benefit from them materially, and I think we're being targeted by Aaron Wall and other SEOs for my "seo is bullshit" comment from 2005 or so.<p>I guess that is fine... I gotta live with the ramifications of what I say. however, for the record I don't believe that SEO is BS any more... when i said that it was when we were building joystiq and autoblog and we spent zero time on SEO.<p>All that being said, we're being targeted by a small group of folks who want to take us down. we're only going to get stronger from this because our hundreds of contributors are rallying around building out the short pages.<p>Topix, Kosmix, NYTimes and Zimbio are all making quality topic pages and are not getting attacked over it. not sure why there is some double standard.<p>regardless.... this is not a material thing for us. we're flushing all these pages and moving them to a different directory going forward so that search engines know where they are located (i.e. /stubs/ ).<p>thanks for the ass kicking.... having a horrible day today over this.<p>jcal<p><a href="http://bit.ly/jasondown" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/jasondown</a>

this is getting very, very old. can we move on? please??

Think this thread has gotten way out of hand.<p>A lot of the comments in here seem like more of a personal attack than anything else. You might as well change the title of this post to "Jason Calacanis ruined the Internet" or something to that effect..<p>Can we stop the drama already? I think we're going to need a hose to control this mob.