exactly. and he had the exact same issue with the exact same site in the past http://www.seobook.com/images/jason-calacanis.png so I am 100% positive it was intentional

His business would come crashing down if he admits even to an inch of this. I have to respect that he knows how to run his business and respond to these types of concerns that are raised about his ethics. But that still doesn't excuse the facts.

Google should simply pull the plug.

Internet users would benefit more from this than pulling the plug from google.cn.

It's actually true... we can make mistakes.

... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's why i no indexed them to being with.

Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a blog.

We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting it back on because we didn't realize it was off.

That is why I thanked Aaron.

Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly certain thing: only index the best pages.

A mistake is something you do where you try to make it right (at least if you acknowledge something as a mistake AND MEAN THAT YOU WANT TO MAKE IT RIGHT you should fix it).

Scraping 3rd party content (without permission) and then putting nofollow on the links is bogus.

But you keep avoiding that issue because you realize what you are doing, and your goal is to cash in on others content for as long as you possibly can.

Nice diversion attempt though!

Thats fair. Theres no denying Jason is good at what he does and understands the web business better than most. I feel like this is an opportunity for those on HN to learn the way he rolls and manages his business.

Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1% .. I think this is more Google's issue than Mahalo's.

"Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1%"

Huh? I'm not sure which way I stand on this whole mess, but the fact that he makes up a tiny portion of the "spam" doesn't seem relevant? Is a petty thief less bad because he accounts for less than .00001% of theft in the world?