[...] and talked about exactly how this makes Google look bad. For those who might not know, I have also been blogging about this [...]

2010 minus 2008 =5 years? Sigh.. Can you, like, try to write a single sentence without it being a lie? Thanks.

[...] Calacanis replied to my post from yesterday. In it he discusses how he is indeed deleting many of the spammy pages [...]

1. You will see nofollow on all short pages today (might take a day to get to all servers/clear cache).

2. pages that have short content/low content have largely been deleted. There are <5k in the system and they are being built out in the next 15 days or so–or they will be deleted.

3. These pages are search pages:
http://www.mahalo.com/search?q=lambada

4. The total impact of these changes was a reduction in traffic of about 6% and an increase in revenue of about 1-2%. These are early results, but it seems that these short pages were not ranking (or at the very least not ranking well) and were not very material. Why our revenue is going up I can't explain. From what I'm told the lower content pages can be a drag on revenue.

5. We're going through every detail of our site design and workflow so that no one can create spam pages/short pages and have them indexed. This will take a couple of more days, but the system will essentially allow us to: a) let a user work on page with noindex on it until it is reviewed OR b) work on a page with noindex on it until it breaks a certain length (say 100 or 200 original words). This is sort of a bummer, since all the other systems out there (Wikipedia, suite101, associated content, ehow, Google's own blogger, Google Knol, etc) allow folks to create a page and be indexed from day one. I guess I'm going to have to get my ass kicked for all time since i said SEO is B.S. five years ago. So be it.

At the end of the day the absurd microscope we're being put under by the SEO community is actually making our product better, and yes even improving the SEO of our best quality pages. For that, I thank you guys.

That being said, you really don't have be so vicious about it.

Jason

[...] Jason Calacanis Makes Matt Cutts A Liar | Smackdown! [...]

[...] Very briefly they added a noindex meta tag to the content-less pages (a change that they then undid after just one day, of course). Probably the biggest change that they made, however, is that they decided to actually [...]

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Does that mean that he basically shows different content to people coming from search engines? Is that kosher?