Calacanis and Mahalo are growing more and more desperate. They raised a huge amount of money for a huge valuation but their traffic has stalled and been going down.
Now they're even more brazen at stealing content from other websites and have not only started taking Fluther's content but also content from few other sites.
And all the while, Google has been giving Mahalo a free pass. If you tried any of this, Google would have slapped you down and put your site into a sandbox or supplementary index bucket. And Mahalo is still spamming the web and Google's doing nothing.
There are downsides to being a great salesman. Sometimes you get what you want. Raising tens of millions of dollars and starting a company has got to be fun. Facing the reality of building a boring ass SEO company? Not so much. Fortunately, he's got enough runway and personal wealth to procrastinate for the next couple years. Maybe a few cheap tricks and shortcuts will keep his traffic growing enough to keep his investors off his back. No? Shit.
I still don't get Mahalo's what makes Mahalo's manually aggregated content business model in 2009 different from Yahoo's manually aggregated content business model in 1995.
For a while, they've been spamming search results with their keyword-rich pages full of links to other sites (no different from what Adsense spammers have been doing for 5+ years http://www.seobook.com/official-mahalo-com-spam-according-go... ) and then they started paying websites to distribute their keyword spam widget ( http://www.seobook.com/mahalo-caught-pagerank-funneling-link... ).
Now they're even more brazen at stealing content from other websites and have not only started taking Fluther's content but also content from few other sites.
And all the while, Google has been giving Mahalo a free pass. If you tried any of this, Google would have slapped you down and put your site into a sandbox or supplementary index bucket. And Mahalo is still spamming the web and Google's doing nothing.