A little over a month ago I sent out a tweet that essentially said mahalo.com was worthless, had no value, and looked like “content throw up.” Well, as you can probably tell, I’ve never really seen the value in Mahalo.com and I’m sure this isn’t what Jason Calacanis (Mahalo’s CEO) wants to hear considering he expects Mahalo.com to have 30%-50% of web searches within 5 years.

So today I read a post at seobook.com about how, according to Google’s definition of spam sites, Mahalo.com should be classified as search engine spam.

Final Notes on Spam When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: if I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? if the answer is no, the page is probably Spam.

So that led me to think about comparing this Mahalo page on “Best computer speakers” to this average spam scraper result page on “Best computer speakers.” (FYI, the latter of which that pollutes the internet and gets blocked from search engines) What’s the difference? Not a whole lot. Neither page gives me the information I’m looking for, but they both link to the information I want.  Both use affiliate links to generate revenue for themselves, and neither contains much, if any, original content.

On the upside for the scraper site, it actually provides links to 20 different sites that can help me find the best computer speakers, and I can use my own judgement to determine the best one and click it.  On the flipside, Mahalo only provides affiliate links to Amazon and 4 other review sites, which further distances me from my goal of finding a variety of sources to buy my new speakers.  And based off my shopping experience over the last 10 years, I really like PriceGrabber, which the spam site has a link to, but Mahalo doesn’t.

This is obviously a multi-year endevour for Calacanis and Mahalo appears to be far from ready for primetime.  I’m really interested to see what Calacanis will have his army of undervalued & volunteer scrapers do over the next couple years to keep themselves in the game, and especially from being blocked by the search engines they are competing with.

Hey Jason, just because you are paying people to create your pages instead of having automated scripts create them, doesn’t make it anymore valuable to the user.  What really makes pages valuable is a majority of original content and not just providing links to the original content.