Of course SEOs don't like Mahalo or the idea behind it - a human based engine isn't good for companies that spend a lot of time fixing up sites so spiders can figure out what they're important to.

It was me and I'm not an "seo". The mahalo ad trial was part of a larger test centered on using ugc in conjucntion with brand terms for driving traffic.

And for the record, I could care less about mahalo until it has enough traffic to make it a viable source of promotion. Until then it's just another site.

http://tropicalseo.com/2007/monday-foo-mahalo-adwords/#comments

Can you be more specific about why you did it?

Jeremy, thanks for letting me know - sorry for missing it in the comments.

No worries, I think I was at least a few days behind noticing that anyone noticed in the first place:-)

I can't share every detail but the basic idea was to test how users (searchers)react to various ad copy created from ugc when searching for a "branded" term. There were a number of sites/ads involved in this test. Mahalo just happened to be one of them. There was also a series of "positive" ads for Mahalo that no one noticed...or at least no one commented on.

Maybe this is no suprise to anyone else - but ads with a "negative" tone outperformed ads with a "positive" tone by over 55%. In this segment of the test performance is defined as CTR as I had no control over the destination pages and could not analyze what happened after people arrived at the site.

Other segments of the test were done on sites I control in order to gauge the ad copy's impact on the conversion process. VERY interesting results in that segment. Think people arriving at your site via a "negative" ad won't convert?