I have - I play about two videogames a year, stickign to things that are rated 97% by most magazines (ie, the few that are really worth playing). Looking for BioShock info I ended up at an original-content-free Mahalo link page.
Either have I honestly, and I am certainly not one to join a private army simply because I am told to (this isn't 4chan).
Unless I see legitimate proof of them "spamming", I'm not planning to report then. People who are affected should, but honestly, there are plenty of spammers/scammers out there. Many are probably more important than these, and I'd rather that Google removes links for fake banking sites and such first, than a website which doesn't even have a bad "web of trust" scorecard.
Reporting Mahalo is more about the fact that they can get away with search engine spam in front of the public. If we use this way to report them, there is absolutely no way for Google to turn a blind eye on this.
Oh, I'm not criticising your campaign, I'm just saying, I've never actually seen one of those Mahalo pages, so I couldn't report them even if I wanted to!
I'd never really had a problem with Mahalo showing up in my results, until yesterday. I Googled my name, and found they were scraping my content and hosting it under a page with my name as the title and url. Yuck.
For a long time, everything I wrote would get re-blogged by dozens of spammy blogs all across the internet, occasionally with the odd misspelling thrown in to simulate original content.
That's what I thought when someone started scraping my feed. It didn't make me feel any better in the long run though. And the bigger problem is that even if you send them a DMCA notice they just take it down and then set it up again on a different domain. They are in it for the quick profit, not the long haul.
I visited that link for the first time. Had to go through the intro page with the two big green buttons. Chose the "search history" button (not the All Web, with toolbar). My history page was completely empty.
Then I tested one search (in another window). Refresh history page, there it is. So it was off before, clicking the button had turned it on.
I deleted that history item, then clicked the "pause" link on the side-list. Was informed that no history would be collected until I clicked "resume".
TL;DR: if going in for the first time, hitting a button on that page will start collecting search history. Apparently.
(1) I don't use Google Toolbar, which is required for that to work (
2) I'm trying to wean myself away from Google for everything by dividing my usage out to other search engines
A single vendor solution for something so private and important is undesirable, on general principals. It's a small step, but an important one, at least to me.
people have reported them through that page countless of times before, which already caused Google to talk to them.
Remember a few days ago there was a post about how Mahalo added noindex to the crap pages for a few days while Matt Cutts was looking at it, and then removed it as soon as he gave them a green flag
I doubt anything will happen unless something big happens. I dunno maybe a class action lawsuit by all the spammers who got banned by Google. Something like "Google is using it's monopoly power to crush competition for it's partners from whom they get a cut of the revenue and for whom they don't enforce the rules".
To be honest, I'm more fed up with the constant handwringing about them over here. I've never even heard of them outside of here, and I've never seen them in my search results.
On a slightly related topic: I'm always wondering if I should report another page that way... swik.net seems to at least try to be legit, but all they do is capture common opensource searches (for example googling "sip yate" gives swik.net/yate+sip) and then display loads of links to other services, without any added value.
Does anyone know if they provide any real services?
So when you search for Wikipedia articles at mahalo.com, you get... Wikipedia articles at mahalo.com? The case would be stronger if you could show searching for "Foo" to come up with the Foo Wikipedia page at mahalo.com above Wikipedia itself.
This is incredibly hard. Most likely they won't rank for the exact same Wikipedia topic, but for more specific queries like "foo bar widget spam other term". Most likely due to the combination of all their scraped content. Google's duplicate content detection is definitely not rock solid and thats why these sites are working. For years in the past and for years to come.
So if a user searches for "foo" he lands on wikipedia, if he wants to get more specific and searches for "foo bar widget spam other term" he lands on the mahalo duplicate content page, again with the same content. Because user research (Don't make me think - Steve Krugs) has shown that if users do not find what they are looking for, they look for the fastest way out. The fastest way out is through all ads placed on Mahalo and thats why they make money.
I hope you and everyone else now sees that all of these pages who make a little impact on their own but a big one on the whole are decreasing the quality of Google's index. And because these terms are so specific its hard (and pointless) to point them out specifically. If you are in Google's index, you rank for some terms, else you wouldn't be indexed, this query conveniently points out all spammy pages on Mahalo so Google can take appropriate action....unless they actually give Mahalo a different treatment than all those other spam sites.
Not sure what the anti Mahalo campaign is all about. Why is there no anti expert-exchange campaign. That paywall shouldn't be anywhere near the top of a single google search.
Because Jeff Atwood actually did something about it, he founded StackOverflow specifically to drive them off the top results for programming questions.
I’m guessing you’re aware of this, but if you scroll far enough down the page you eventually get to the answers; sometimes, the answers are quite decent too.
While I agree that the number of people reporting this may be less than you think, linking to that Wikipedia article is a bit overly dramatic, isn't it? It's about playing some algorithm on some website...
Searched "dragon age origins walkthrough" a month or so ago when I was playing the game.
Mahalo's page "Dragon Age Origins Walkthrough" is on the first page of results. It contains zero walkthrough content. There is a placeholder paragraph that reads "This section of the Guide Note should include two or three sentences about the actor and the role they are best known for playing"... like instructions for someone to make said page.
Strange, I would have expected pretty much everybody here at HN to have their own sites, and therefore use Google's Webmaster Tools on a regular basis.
