BlackWaterOps

Jason Calcanis asked today why Mahalo’s rankings in MSN are so different than the rankings in Google.

I could give the Snarky Answer that if they both ranked about the same Google wouldn’t have so much more market share, but there are some real differences in the way the two engines treat content.

Google has a less strict content duplication detection, and I would say a better method of detecting which site is the “source”.

Mahalo, is almost never the “source” of anything. It doesn’t employ Journalists, it employs “archivists” for lack of a better word.  Its writers take articles from Wikipedia, AP, Reuters and other sources and create “Readers Digest” versions of them.

The result to Google, or Live.com is that often the stories look like the same post as the source page.  Which in truth they should. Consider the following text:

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill cam tumbling after.

To Live.com (MSN) this block of text reads as just a set of keyword roots.

JACK JILL HILL FETCH PAIL WATER JACK FELL BROKE CROWN JILL TUMBLE

Because of that, what would appear to be “Unique Text” often isn’t.

JACK and JILL were at the HILL looking to FETCH a PAIL filled with WATER when JACK had a fall ( FELL ) and BROKE  the CROWN of his head. JILL then tumbled ( TUMBLE ) after.

Google looks at blocks of text in about 300 word chunks.  Live.com looks at them in about 20 word chunks.

This makes Live a lot more sensitive to Duplicate content.

As a “bonus” Live.com really runs up the Duplicate content penalty if a page you link to contains the same content as the page doing the linking.  The assumption is that if you quote a page and link to it, that page is the source.

That is probably a correct assumption, though often what a user is looking for is the site that converts that link to “An equation for the calculation of the gravimetric forces exerted between subatomic particles” in to a brief analogy of how string theory works, not the work itself.

This is where Google really shines.

Google looks at the Authority of the site pretty heavily.  If Mahalo gives “good enough” results 90% of the time, then it is a safe bet that when given the choice between them, or a random strangers site which may talk about “Prince Seragu of Nigeria” then Mahalo is a safe bet, even if the other site contains very similar keywords.

Live.com has a concept of authority, but it looks at your category authority too.  This is where the world gets infinitely complex, and in most cases complex = erratic.

So Mahalo is a bit erratic to begin with, they cover everything, to the same level of mediocrity. (no offense Jason, but all of your pages are under 2000 words you aren’t a source of deep knowledge).  This means that Mahalo only ever is “OK” as a result, so Live.com starts scoring the obscure things that Mahalo covers better than most sites start to gain category authority for, and the things they cover “less good” end up not gaining category authority for.

Lastly is a difference between Google and Live which is just plain stupid on Live’s part.  Live’s Splog/Spam detection thinks that if you link to a page on your site more than about 300 times that you are spamming.  Google only counts the first 200 times you link to a page internally, or 200 links from another domain to a single page on your site, but Live.com starts to penalize you when you get over a number.  So if you have too many pages which “side link” or incidental link to Britney Spears, Live.com penalizes you.

So this is why Mahalo ranks so erratically. 

UPDATE:

To that end, I spoke with Tyler over at Mahalo, and have made some suggestions.  The problem Mahalo has to wrestle with, is which of the things which I suggested can be fixed in old content.  Changing your writing style in 60k posts is hard, which is why it is important to speak with someone ( BlackWaterOPS ) before your copy hits the web, so that your website doesn’t have to be redone.  This wasn’t an option for Mahalo, but what they now know can help them with new posts, or posts they update.