[mvandemar]

Savings.com != Mahalo.com. There is no reason to rank Mahalo... if that is the site being looked for then rank Savings.com instead.

It is what is known as a "thin affiliate" site, and it adds a layer of navigation to the user and middleman payouts to the advertiser, lowering user experience and driving up advertiser costs.

[epoxy]

FYI: Calacanis sits on the board of Savings.com.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/05/savingscom-makes-coupons-mo...

[mvandemar]

re: But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for".

Yes, it is, the searcher doesn't know that though. That's Google's job, to rank the most relevant sites to the query. If those coupons are what the user is looking for then that site is what should come up first.

I also want to add that at this moment Savings.com does indeed outrank Mahalo.com for that query. While this may change (and based on past experience with Mahalo's empty pages many of them will outrank other sites that are higher quality eventually), that is not what the bulk of the issue is. Those Savings.com feeds are not "human powered" anything. They are exactly the kinds of pages that Jason told Matt Cutts he had removed from his site. They are the antithesis of what Jason claimed his site was all about just 4 days ago. That's the main issue.

[bobbyi]

But Savings.com isn't "the site being looked for". The user has never heard of Savings.com and doesn't care about them. They user is looking for coupon codes and they are listed clearly on the Mahalo landing page.

The point of an affiliate program is to let other people distribute the coupons, so it's not as if he is doing something shady by "scraping" content from elsewhere as the article implies.

I do agree that he is violating AdSense rules and shouldn't have the AdSense boxes on those pages, but (correct me if I'm wrong) Matt Cutts isn't involved in AdSense and is just focussed on indexing, so that's not the issue at hand when the author is attacking him.