We are noindexing the pages that have short content and are older than 30 days. If they are less than 30 days old and get more than 50 views we build them out.
That's just a smart strategy, and there is nothing black hat of it.
Also, 90% of our traffic comes from Q&A, walkthroughs and howto articles that are REALLY DEEP in terms of content.
And time and again you have had scraper pages wind up in the search results against the search engine guidelines with various excuses each time. On those types of pages Google states "Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content." so no...those are not at all within the guidelines (or even the spirit of the guidelines).
Syndicating content without asking permission and providing no way to opt out and putting nofollow on the links is also a quite dirty business practice.
Keep in mind that scraper sites are not something you learned from me. If someone like me puts up a site like that it is burned almost immediately. Whereas your site has been scraping content for years. (I have never ran any scraper sites, but when Teeceo did what you are doing Matt Cutts described it as "shoot on sight" publicly on his blog)
We target put 300-500+ original words on each page we index--just like a newspaper or blog.
I know this is highly personally for you, but you don't have to make things up Aaron!
Also:
1. Google is VERY smart about how people can try to game the system and they WILL NOT RANK pages with low content value--you know this!
2. In the small number of cases when a page manager makes a small content page we build it out the SECOND IT GETS OVER 25-50 views.
We WANT TO HAVE high quality pages and we produce a ton of them every day. We DON'T want short pages because google will penalize you for them.
We used to remove this pages from the index with nofollow and that got removed by accident--not that it matters because GOOGLE IS SMART and doesn't rank them anyway.
We are going to have them all noindexed again just so you will move your hate and venom on to someone else..... also because it will help our page rank!
that's the irony of this.... if we don't have these short pages we will DO BETTER! That's why we noindexed them to being with.
So, for that, I thank you for the free SEO of advice.
Also, you will be happy to know that you attention has sent us some more quality writers who want to take part in our revenue sharing content system, as well as a client who wants to work with our Q&A/knowledge platform.
if you were a sales person i would have to pay you a fat commission... instead I'll buy you a dinner and a couple of beers at the next SMX so you can chill out.
seriously dude... chill, life is short! worry about the people in Haiti or the fact that the iPad doesn't have a USB port!
If that was actually true then perhaps you would have more full time in-house editorial staff (instead of canning them all). If that was actually true then perhaps I wouldn't see any of your scraped pages ranking in the search results. If that was actually true then you wouldn't be scraping 3rd party content into almost all your pages.
But its not true...and so we are back at the beginning again.
Here are some examples of pages with no original content and many times the content on the top of the page is from search results:
http://www.mahalo.com/moding http://www.mahalo.com/grammar http://www.mahalo.com/phonograms http://www.mahalo.com/porn2girls http://www.mahalo.com/idahosex http://www.mahalo.com/guddagudda http://www.mahalo.com/forumbi http://www.mahalo.com/guerradechistes http://www.mahalo.com/rajaleelai http://www.mahalo.com/chiba http://www.mahalo.com/matahariku
Pages that have original content, but much less than 300 original words: http://www.mahalo.com/svu http://www.mahalo.com/plumpynut
I'm sure I could generate a very large list of pages that fall into either of these categories.
I understand that Aaron might have some personal issues with you, but it doesn't appear that he is making this stuff up.