[...] Jason Calacanis lied repeatedly about “experimental pages” and other such nonsense. But when his schemes were highlighted he was offered the benefit of the doubt. eHow also enjoys that benefit of the doubt. It [...]

If you don’t know, Mahalo has tons of these and they consistently rank #1.

Well, it was my personal mission to rank ahead of Mahalo for one of my sites. I managed to do it with a massive backlinking campaign. I took the #1 spot and I made $700 in one month from Adsense on that one site.

About 2 weeks after taking over #1, I got a letter from the restaurant’s attorney stating my site violated their trademarks and I needed to remove it or be sued.

Not wanting a legal battle I removed the site and asked the attorney about Mahalo and why they could advertise but I couldn’t.

I got no response from the attorney and they told me to never use the name of the restaurant on any site again.

I’m guessing Mahalo will never be banned from Google because Jason is helping Google to make tons of money.

Quite honestly, even though I was frustrated with Mahalo ranking ahead of me, and then my site being forced down, I have no problem with Jason.

I think that he should keep doing what he’d doing until his site is deindexed. I mean he’s making a killing, why hold it against him. Google should be who you are slamming.

If Aaron Wall or Oilman or another successful marketer created a content aggregation website similar to Mahalo, would it immediately be banned by Google? Would they have a chance of defending their content aggregation strategies, website scraping and partnerships with the webspam team?

Historically, Google has approached SEO with a shoot first, ask questions later philosophy. All these discussions could be solved if Google publicly said: any SEO can create a site similar to Mahalo/ehow/associatedcontent and we would not have a problem with it.

From @jason This is perhaps the best comment of the year:
“We’ve run what we’re doing by SEO after SEO–including Aaron Wall–and no one can tell me one thing we’re doing that is even close to grey, let alone black.”

I would give anything to have this message in the footer of mahalo.com and all of Calacanis’s emails:

I’m Aaron Wall and I approve this message.

[...] like Aaron Wall said: Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search [...]

[...] to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search [...]

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblo.....wikipedia/

http://www.mahalo.com/caron-wheeler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caron_Wheeler

http://www.mahalo.com/the-funk-brothers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Funk_Brothers

i have much more respect for a guy trying, right or wrong, than one pointing out anothers faults.

Which you say as a precursor to pointing out what you perceive as my faults. Whatever. If you want to be taken seriously then drop both the anonymity and the double standard.