[petercooper]

you can nofollow links created by users but you should not nofollow links to content that YOU decided was worthy of inclusion on your site.

To be fair, he can do whatever he likes - as long as it's legal. Aside from the murky spammy waters Mahalo seems to wading in, the "nofollow" is merely a hack devised by Google (that's also acknowledged by Bing and poorly implemented by Yahoo).

Jason can put anything legal on his pages with no qualms or being a "scammer" or whatever. It's Google's job, then, to remove Mahalo from the index if it doesn't like his "content." The ethical argument should be around this scraping, not the use of a proprietary hack Google came up with to get around an indexing problem they couldn't be arsed to solve properly.

[elsewhen]

i agree that mahalo is not doing anything illegal, the simple point is their actions are unethical.

scraping content is allowed under fair use, but going the extra step of nofollowing is an intentional attempt to use someone else's content without passing pagerank.

it is a deliberate attempt to outrank the sources. this is pretty much akin to a mid-level manager taking credit for the work performed by one of the people that reports to him. illegal? no. lame and worthy of being called out for? yes.

i also agree with you that the real onus is on google to not rank sites that engage in this tactic.

[petercooper]

it is a deliberate attempt to outrank the sources.

Of course it is. That's like saying Obama's presidential campaign was a deliberate attempt to win the election.

The issue, though, is that Mahalo could not rank higher than original sources unless Google is doing a shoddy job of indexing the Web. Just because Mahalo has a few good pages doesn't mean the rest should automatically be trusted. Google need to figure that out - and fast.

[aaronwall]

This domain authority exploit is exactly what many business models are being built on...Demand Media, Mahalo, Aol, etc etc etc