The Google Litmus Test

I guess I should call this the Search Engine Litmus Test, but Google is still the king of search, so we will focus on Google and whether Jason Calacanis, who said affiliates were at the bottom of the food chain, and his Mahalo site should pass the Google Litmus test or not. I remember well when Google first started cleaning out datafeed sites from their search engine, and, although it didn’t help my bottom line, I understood, why would they want to send people to my site so I could sent them to a merchant site, when Google could leave my site out and send them straight there? So, why would Google want to send people to Mahalo just so they can send them to another site? Now I know they have indeed created some good content, like how to play the guitar, etc, so, I’m not saying it’s all bad. This is in no particular order, just some observations that I have made recently while looking around Mahalo and Google. I also asked some questions of a former Mahalo mentor and will be including some quotes below.

What is the purpose of all the stub pages on Mahalo? Here is a page linking to a bunch of them, http://www.mahalo.com/Category:Video_Game_Stubs. Now, I’m not saying that all of them are without adequate content as I have not checked them all, but LOTS of them are what I would call content rich doorway pages, meaning they are built like the rest of the site, they just do not have any specific content related to the title of the page, they mainly contain links to other pages or related content. For example, Gears of War 2 is slated to be released in November, over 7 months away, yet we see pages for Gears of War 2 Cheats, Gears of War 2 Review, and Gears of War 2 Walkthrough, none of which contain any content and are actually almost exactly the same, linking to the main Gears of War 2 page along with some other Gears of War 2 sites. All three of these pages are listed on the first page of Google results and should provide some nice traffic once the game is released, but why are they already created without content and should Google actually be listing duplicate content so well? Better yet, if you are really wanting to create high quality sites, like Jason says he does, that are not polluting the search engines, shouldn’t pages such as this be set to no index until they actually have some content?

Jimmy: I’ve noticed that they have a lot of video game content, even for games that are not out yet, did they encourage you to create pages without content just to get the traffic or to be ready? Just curious as to how and why that is done, since there are hundreds of them listed in Google.

MM: Again they select the content that is available for PTG’s to work on, and I don’t know how or why. I could speculate the larger amounts of video game content as well as entertainment, gossip, etc, would be solely for higher traffic. But again I’m uncertain as to why they chose some of the page we worked on.

I will say, Halo 3 was and might still be the biggest traffic generator there. The Halo 3 skulls pages are really what put Mahalo on the map. If you look they are still in the top pages for Google. That might have helped with the decision on creating more game pages.

For right now, it looks like Video games are a top paying page for PTG’s. Therefore I’d assume more ptg’s would be working on them. They have changed a few rules related to whom can work on pages, how fast they must be done, and given some areas priority so I’m not certain if that has an affect or not

I had read on a couple other blogs where people had mentioned they quit reading Jason’s personal site because all he was doing was spamming the Mahalo site, well, it certainly looks like he was using his blog to the best of his ability to get Mahalo pages listed and indexed highly. Link spamming comes to mind on quite a few pages, like this one about everything Thanksgiving, wait it’s not everything, this is. Not to mention the fact that when Jason links to one of the Mahalo serps, he usually ends up with a couple results on the first page, like this query Super Smash Bros Brawl Unlockable Characters and many, many others I have checked, with his site and Mahalo both in the results, but, that’s not polluting the serps because it’s Jason Calacanis, he only makes quality sites.

Jimmy: Did they encourage people to use the alexa toolbar at any time?

MM: Yes the Alexa toolbar is one of the suggestions for finding pages, a lot of the suggestions are covered right in the Mahalo greenhouse guide. You aren’t told you have to cover pages by best rank but you typically must include the top Google pages per search term plus a couple other specific pages in order for pages to be accepted.

Does anyone else use Alexa to search for stuff? You don’t think they would encourage the guides and mentors to install the toolbar just to increase their Alexa ranking do you? Check out where people go on Mahalo:

mahalo.com – 49%
greenhouse.mahalo.com – 28%
guides.mahalo.com – 20%
daily.mahalo.com – 2%
Other websites – 1%

When you create a webpage, do you usually open it up to make sure it looks okay and you didn’t make any stupid mistakes? I know I always do, so if 28% of the people go to the greenhouse to make pages, wouldn’t you think 28% of the visitors to Mahalo.com would be guides or mentors? Alexa will only count one visit per person per page, but, they count every page you visit, so, I don’t think I am too far off on my thinking here. I assume the guides.mahalo.com is not open to the public either, although, I didn’t try anything other than trying to open guides.mahalo.com.

Oh, and while you are at Alexa, if you go there, change the range to one year and check out that initial jump in traffic. I wish my websites came out of the gate like that.

Jimmy: How do you feel about Mahalo now? The people you worked with, and, more importantly, do you think they really want to make search better, or, in the end, is it all about the Benjamin’s?

MM: The at home people I worked with are/were great. The staff there I won’t comment on but I feel either they didn’t know how to run the business or they really were just trying to pull a fast one on us most of the time. There were numerous issues with payments, policies, etc. It was a start-up so some of it could be related there, but they never really seemed on the ball.

Are they trying to better search, no not at all. Jason is just trying to make more money. I could go on and on about it but he’s bashed people over and over again for SEO, Affiliate Market, Splogging and Social Marketing and that seems to me all they do there. I really didn’t know much about SEO and SEM back when I was there. But I picked up a bunch of things mid-stream. And in my personal opinion the way pages are formatted they are basically pushing keyword after keyword for each term.

When I left they were transitioning into buzz terms and stubs (brief pages for “explosive content”). In my opinion it was a lot like trends chasing. I can’t give a great deal of info there as its still covered in the contracts so I’d rather not comment too much. But from what I’ve seen they’ve made more and more push towards that direction and less push for traditional pages. Just look at the top listed pages as of now, you could also watch Google trends and I’m sure they’ll cover something quickly.

Get a bunch of hot links out as fast as you can to bump up page ranks and traffic numbers. That was one thing Jason always ran down, and was always against but that’s the direction I saw them heading.

That echoed my original thoughts when I first heard about Mahalo.

Jimmy: Any other thoughts from your perspective?

MM: Personally, I think they started off in the right direction and had a decent Idea. Would it have been a better search, no of course not. It would have just been different.

As PTG’s you are basically trained to use the top pages from Google and scrap info from Wikipedia or an official site. So what makes that better? Is there better info on a Mahalo page? No! Why, because they used a bunch of people that really had little to no interest in the pages they created. A lot of the people there at the time were doing pages they weren’t passionate about. Sports pages were popular, fast and easy so PTG’s rushed through them not even knowing anything about sports.

The majority of the info on a page is from Wikipedia and in plenty of cases its not complete or not the most interesting information out there. Users that don’t know much about a particular subject aren’t likely to provide the best content.

Pages aren’t updated, or the majority of the ones I’ve reviewed weren’t. Pages that are newer or drive more traffic probably are, but the rest don’t look to be.

I think, they saw that they weren’t driving enough traffic with just the pages they had, or they built their foundation of pages achieved a bit of a rank and then shifted mid-stream. They started off by luring in PTG’s with what for the most part was pretty good pay. Built up a bit of a standing and then dumped their pay.

Right now it looks like they’ve got PTG pages sitting since Feb 12th, and overall the greenhouse production is way down. I know delays in having pages quality controlled was a big issues for many PTG’s. But now with the lower payments and more delays it looks like they’ve been doing less of the work.

I guess you’ll have that when you are paying people to write about stuff, instead of paying people who are passionate about a subject to write about it.

What I would like to know, if anyone out there is willing to share, is how much traffic are people receiving from Mahalo? Anyone know anybody at Gamespot, IGN or Youtube to see how much traffic they get from them?

Does Mahalo deserve to be in Google? Some of the pages they have created are very good and should be listed, unless, of course, they have been re-written from Wikipedia or someplace else, but a lot of those pages are doing what he said affiliates were doing, polluting the web.

Jimmy Daniels