Search Spam Fight – Mahalo: 1; Squidoo: 0

Last week, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo renewed his campaign from earlier this year against Squidoo as a source of search spam. This time, he appears to have gotten a result. Despite Squidoo’s belated plea that it would clean things up, Google seems to have penalized Squidoo. Below, a timeline for those keeping score along with […]

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Matt, His Cat & LOLbanning

Last week, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo renewed his campaign from earlier this year against Squidoo as a source of search spam. This time, he appears to have gotten a result. Despite Squidoo’s belated plea that it would clean things up, Google seems to have penalized Squidoo. Below, a timeline for those keeping score along with snarky post-game analysis and an explanation of that weird cat photo above.

  • February 2007: Calacanis does a post called "Is
    Squidoo becoming a massive, dirty SEO back alley?
    " Squidoo takes a PR hit,
    but no search impact on the site is reported.
     
  • May 2007: Calacanis launches his own human-powered service Mahalo
    (see Mahalo Launches
    With Human-Crafted Search Results
    ) that competes with Squidoo and its
    human lensmasters.
     
  • June 13, 2007: Mahalo lets more people be involved with Mahalo (see
    Mahalo Greenhouse: Get
    Paid For Writing Search Results
    ), making it seem even more like Squidoo.
    Not so,
    objects
    Jason: "You can only get into the Greenhouse if you are accepted
    and a real person. Squidoo lets anyone create a lens and as a result the site
    is filled with spam."
     
  • July 5, 2007: Squidoo
    blogs
    that it is working on the spam issue.
     
  • July 6, 2007: Despite Squidoo’s post, Calacanis starts

    calls foul
    on it the day after: "Frankly, I think Seth has fallen to the
    dark side and has become a Sith Lord of SEO, deceptive affiliate links, and
    page view gaming." Later that day, he

    mentions
    discovering Squidoo’s post of July 5, writing: "I’m going to give
    them the benefit of the doubt for now and check back on this in August."
     
  • July 8, 2007: GigaOm picks up on the
    chatter about Jason’s complaints, writing
    The Squidoo Spam Problem,
    but focusing really on the issue of blog comment spamming.
     
  • July 9, 2007: Squidoo blogs
    again that they’re working
    further on fixing the spam issue.
     
  • July 9, 2007:

    Squidoo Slap!!
    covers what I think is an email from Squidoo to lensmasters
    saying that Squidoo has lost rankings in Google. For the record, I
    see plenty of
    pages still listed, and
    PageRank there for
    the home page is still a healthy PR6. Of course, that doesn’t mean a penalty
    hasn’t been applied in a non-visible means.
     
  • July 12, 2007: What’s
    next for Squidoo?
    from Squidoo founder Seth Godin says the spam fighting
    tools promised are now supposed to be all in place.

Now for the analysis!

Apologies to Seth, but I never cared that much about Squidoo. I didn’t see it
as some new massive wonderful advancement in search. But if you want to know
more about it, check out Chris Sherman’s recent interview here with Seth,
Q&A With Seth Godin,
Founder & CEO Of Social Search Service Squidoo
.

I joked during
Monday’s Daily
SearchCast
that now that Mahalo seems to have lost the initial attention it
had (Surprise,
Mahalo Still Blows
covers how talking cats seem more popular that his Mahalo
search engine), going after Squidoo seemed a nice way to drum-up new attention
for his site.

Indeed — that master of baiting has done it again. Here I, along with lots
of other people, are mentioning Mahalo. Jason even does some bragging in
comments on his Squidoo feud

at Valleywag
: "Five mentions in your first 48 hours Owen!!! This is a real
turnaround since Nick stopped covering Mahalo."

Of course, Jason also

said
as part of the current campaign that he’d go after spam anywhere:

For the record, everyone knows I attacking anything that has to do with
deceiving users or the pollution of the "infovironment." My feeling is we have
to expose anything bad on the internet including malware, spyware, bad SEO,
PayPerPost, FederatedMedia’s high-class version of PayPerPost, Squidoo,
VibrantMedia, etc. If Squidoo were spam, porn, and SEO free–heck if it were
SEO, porn, spam-light–I wouldn’t even bring this up!

Sure — there’s spam at Squidoo, but frankly, I haven’t seen much of it at
Google. As I said on the Daily SearchCast show, it’s one thing to point a ton of
junk there, but that doesn’t mean it’s showing up in the top search results.

But it was ranking and lost those ranks! Ranking for what? Ranking for things
doesn’t mean people are actually searching for them nor even clicking on you.

So to some degree, who cares if Squidoo is spam ridden? If Google’s been
keeping it from showing up in top results (as seems to be the case in my
experience; I never see it as a perennial search results page favorite like Wikipedia or Technorati), then the
campaign really hasn’t solved anything other than maybe cutting off an entirely
different problem: blog spam out of Squidoo. Oh, and getting Mahalo more
attention, of course.

Jason’s heading toward his own issue with Google. Earlier this year, Google
warned that it
didn’t want to be indexing search results from other people. But so far, Mahalo
has yet to prevent its search result from showing up. I asked Jason about this a
few weeks ago, and his response was to smile and say that so far, Google doesn’t
seem to be acting on that warning — so why should Mahalo block it? And that’s
true — and if he does what he intends with Mahalo — Google might decide he’s got
quality stuff that should show up.

But let’s be clear. Despite all of Jason’s slams against SEO (see
From My Inbox: More
Defense Of SEO
and
Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason
), Mahalo itself is a massive SEO
play, hoping to draw major traffic from the search engines. Maybe it’s not a
dark back alley as he accused Squidoo of being. But if not, he’s only going to
prove that SEO does not equal bad junk, as he often has argued.

Finally, that picture up there is Google spam fighter
Matt Cutts with one of his cats,
as originally pictured
here
. So far, Matt’s not officially weighed in on whether Squidoo was
actually penalized or not. Neither has his cat Emmy. As for the cat talking, well — I always wanted to do
a LOLcat (explained more here;
build your own at LolCat
Builder
; laugh at them at I CAN HAS
CHEEZBURGER?
).


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Danny Sullivan
Contributor
Danny Sullivan was a journalist and analyst who covered the digital and search marketing space from 1996 through 2017. He was also a cofounder of Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and MarTech, and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. He retired from journalism and Third Door Media in June 2017. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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