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Comment by joez | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to the morality of Mahalo and Jason's hand in it but I think since there are attacks on his person that I should bring to light some of the positives he's done for the startup community.

Techcrunch50

This Week In Startups (including encounter with Keiretsu Forum)

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Unfortunately, as is the case with Mahalo, when one is both the CEO and "public face" of a corporation's brand, it is difficult partition the two relms outside of clearly personal matters (e.g. health, friends, family, etc.). A classic case being Martha Stewart.

In some instances, with morality and 'key executive personnel' insurance clauses in compensation agreements, they are, in fact, inextricably contractually coupled. As the saying goes, "it comes with the territory" and I'm sure is adequately reflected in his ownership of the company and current compensation.

Also, FWIW, I don't believe this was his original plan (e.g. Mahalo Daily's original format hosted by Veronica Belmont). Nevertheless, that's been the situation for years and Jason, and his board, have apparently seen no good reason to change it.

I believe that Jason's original plan was to have a true search engine with quality human written pages that people would want to use as their homepage instead of google. However this plan was not successful and Jason has realised the opportunity to drive huge amounts of traffic to Maholo from Google. This means that ranking in google for hundreds of thousands of keywords comes first and the quality of content on the pages comes second. It's obvious by the number of ads on the pages that they don't care about the user experience. They know that if people don't find what they were searching for they will click on an ad when leaving.

Not exactly.... take a look at the how to articles, walkthroughs, buzz news on the homepage and Q&A community. We're doing some amazing content and Aaron is focusing on short pages that are not ranked in any search engine and, that frankly, we don't let folks build any more (we started with an open system like wikipedia where anyone could build and build they did... now we have a system like MTurk where you have to complete the page before we publish it).

the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out.

so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia terms).

however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long tail ones.... and even that is rare.

google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated.

Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)

PEOPLE, QUIT DOWN-VOTING THIS MAN!

I'm that much of a hacker news user, but I come around here enough to know that this site prides itself on reasoned discussions. We're all supposed to be thinking adults, we can politely read what he has to say and decide for ourselves if he's full of it or not.

We don't need the mob doing the internet version of throwing rotten fruit at him.

Thanks for that. :-)

I also feel that Mahalo falls into that category and I don't understand what the problem is with us explaining the SEO value of our Q&A/knowledge platform.

It's excellent at white-hat SEO, just like Yahoo Answers and Wikipedia are.

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