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Comment by rinich | Hacker News Reader

I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.

I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always.

I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.

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of course he is acting polite. he is still stealing people's content.

I am just calling a spade a spade.

I have never met the guy in person...I just think he should hold himself to a higher standard if he is going to trash an entire industry he should educate himself on best practices within it rather than claiming ignorance while building a deceptive business model.

Sounds like there's some bad blood between Jason and Aaron. Maybe I don't know enough about SEO to get the sting of Aaron's arguments, but on the surface Jason has been cordial and Aaron has been vicious. That's not helping your credibility Aaron.

That's one of the problem - most people don't know enough about SEO to know what exactly is going on. They place blind trust in those who are featured in the mainstream media.

While Jason goes out in public and says one thing, based the examples in Aaron's blog post he does just the opposite in practice.

Sites like Mahalo that auto generate content and scrape content are increasingly becoming a problem online as they clutter the search results and hurt the publishers they scrape and steal from. Google is doing worse than turning a blind eye to this as they actually are encouraging these very large "content providers" to create content for filling ad space (see the Wired article on Demand Media).

With SEO being an industry that has a negative perception by many, those involved in the industry feel the need to defend their profession.

It goes beyond SEO being an industry. Many "SEO's" who are actually good at what they do spend a lot less time on SEO as a profession and spend 100x more time on building businesses. Auto-generated content sites like Mahalo, eHow & other Demand Media junk are hurting their legitimate businesses with debatably unethical businesses practices.

Let's use a different industry to illustrate what is happening. Let's say a band named The Beatles records a new album. The local radio station gets a copy of their album and plays their song. The listeners love it so they play it more often, but they don't mention who the band it and on their website, they put up a link to download the song... but without any credits. Their audience grows. They get advertisers to advertise to their audience. They say, "hey, playing good songs gets use more listeners and more listeners get us more advertisers, which gets us more $$. Let's do this more often." So they go do this 500,000 times, and each time never mentioning who the artist is. They grow and prosper while the artists starve. Oh, in the mean time they call the artist scum.

In the above metaphor, the artists are the bloggers whose content Mahalo is using. The radio station ripping off the artist is Mahalo. The Federal Communication Commission is like Google, who is allowing all this to continue because the radio station is giving them a cut from the advertising revenue.

Hope this helps make it a little more clear why what they are doing is wrong, needed to get exposed and needs to get fixed.

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