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What comes to mind when you see the word ’spam’? The iconic can of smeat (specks of meat)? Unwanted email? Hawaiian food?

To me, spam means search engine results which have been manipulated by tactics the search engines don’t approve of.

An old school example of spam is automating comment submission to Wordpress blogs with a bot. These comments then link back to a website you want to rank in search engines. Another would be dynamically inserting unauthorized links into a website you don’t own via hacking.

According to Aaron Wall, one new school approach to spamming can be seen over at Mahalo.com.

What is this ‘Mahalo’?

Mahalo is the brain child of welebrity (web + celebrity) Jason Calacanis. Touted as a “human-powered search engine”, the content on Mahalo is human edited, and – according to Wikipedia – intended to avoid the problems of algorithmic search engine gaming.

The concept was to create a website that delivered valuable, human-powered content about the hottest topics of the day.

Due in part to Calacanis’ name recognition and a fairly long build up to launch, Mahalo has quickly become a reasonably powerful, authoritative website which can rank within search engines for any number of keyword terms.

Aaron’s Case Against Mahalo

Wall makes a strong case for what he calls a “Black Hat SEO Case Study”, and documents a number of tactics they use to game search engine results. While it’s certainly not spammy to create content and leverage PR to create backlinks and conversation, there does seem to be something strange with a particular tactic Aaron points out:

“Search engines like Google scrape content so that they may provide a service of value to end users *and* publishers. When they make your snippets they are used to help promote your website.
What Mahalo does is take snippets, and publish them as content on their site. So they use your page titles and your content snippet to rank their site using your content, without your permission.
If you optimize your page titles on a new blog post you are helping to feed relevant optimized content into the Mahalo machine. They will scrape it, and if you are less authoritative than they are, they will likely outrank you!
To add further insult to injury, they put nofollow on links back to the content source which they are scraping content from, so while they are “borrowing” your content you are not getting any link credit for it.”

That, to me, is a little concerning. The search engine indexes are already competitive, and will only become more so if large, authoritative websites leverage their brand to walk the edge of black/white hat SEO.

SEO professionals have little to worry about because we’re savvy enough to build authoritative websites that can compete with larger sites. It’s the newcomers and mom-and-pops out there that I see being the potential victims in this, as creating a new domain and gaining search engine traffic isn’t exactly intuitive for many people, and having your content used against you by a more authoritative website is a nightmare scenario indeed.
This is one to watch.

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