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Comment by elsewhen | Hacker News Reader

in my opinion, the slimiest thing that mahalo is doing is scraping content and then nofollowing the attribution links. nofollow was designed for outgoing links that a publisher cannot vouch for - ie links in blog discussions.

but mahalo is nofollowing attribution links to content that THEY have decided to scrape.

jason is conflating two things when he says "Do you think we should remove nofollow from our links? we added this to avoid the problem of SEOs coming in and turning Mahalo into a link farm"

you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site.

it seems very clear to me, that this guy is playing dumb.

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"you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site."

+1 ... Preach on!!!

The only reason there an (alleged) need for nofollow is because they are scraping tons of content & displaying it without any editorial curation.

If they actually were a human powered search (as they falsely claim to be) and did editorial review of the links then why would they need to add nofollow to links that passed their editorial guidelines?

Further lets not forget that in the past Mahalo did provide direct outbound links. 18 months ago I predicted them adding nofollow at some point, Jason stopped by with what he called a "fact check" ... and then they later added nofollow...pretty funny! http://www.seobook.com/when-will-mahalo-add-nofollow-outboun...

you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site.

To be fair, he can do whatever he likes - as long as it's legal. Aside from the murky spammy waters Mahalo seems to wading in, the "nofollow" is merely a hack devised by Google (that's also acknowledged by Bing and poorly implemented by Yahoo).

Jason can put anything legal on his pages with no qualms or being a "scammer" or whatever. It's Google's job, then, to remove Mahalo from the index if it doesn't like his "content." The ethical argument should be around this scraping, not the use of a proprietary hack Google came up with to get around an indexing problem they couldn't be arsed to solve properly.

i agree that mahalo is not doing anything illegal, the simple point is their actions are unethical.

scraping content is allowed under fair use, but going the extra step of nofollowing is an intentional attempt to use someone else's content without passing pagerank.

it is a deliberate attempt to outrank the sources. this is pretty much akin to a mid-level manager taking credit for the work performed by one of the people that reports to him. illegal? no. lame and worthy of being called out for? yes.

i also agree with you that the real onus is on google to not rank sites that engage in this tactic.

it is a deliberate attempt to outrank the sources.

Of course it is. That's like saying Obama's presidential campaign was a deliberate attempt to win the election.

The issue, though, is that Mahalo could not rank higher than original sources unless Google is doing a shoddy job of indexing the Web. Just because Mahalo has a few good pages doesn't mean the rest should automatically be trusted. Google need to figure that out - and fast.

This domain authority exploit is exactly what many business models are being built on...Demand Media, Mahalo, Aol, etc etc etc

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