According to Aaron Wall, since Mahalo adds no value (if you remove the links which point to other pages on the Internet), it violates Google's spam guidelines.
While many people, particularly SEOs (who have been frustrated with Jason's commentary in the past -- though to me, he redeemed himself during the keynote at SESNY last week), lauded Aaron's statements, I have to disagree with Aaron's statement. Personally, do you think that this post on how to convert from a PC to Mac lacks any substance? I think it's a great piece.
Jason responds in the Sphinn thread:
Over time I think you’ll see our pages grow to be over 50% original content, 20% links, and 20% UGC (i.e. reviews, votes, comments). Most pages in the system are 50-70% complete.... over the next two to three years they will reach 80-90% complete thanks to the help of the community and they will be worthy of a top 30-50 ranking in 20-30% of the cases is my guess.
Furthermore, all pages with less than 400 unique words will be nofollowed.
Personally, I think that's a great step. And I have to continue to disagree with individuals who think it's appropriate to continue bashing Jason when he clearly rectified the situation last week -- since, well, I was there.
As one member puts it, "if an actual human being combs through that data to provide us a garbage free page, then it should not be considered scraping or spam."
Agreed on all fronts.
Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.
