Question: how does somebody end up at this spam page? Google seems to do a good job of filtering stuff like this. It wasn't in the first 10 or so pages of search results for "aaron wall"
Second: the idea is not to rank for every page. But the marginal cost of one more page is basically zero. So if even 1% of them rank on page one, the return on investment can be pretty high.
Calacanis is in a tough position, to be honest. He can dial down the quality and automatically get more revenue for no extra money. But he can't reduce the capital expenditure he made to create this system in the first place.
It's sort of like being a janitor, but having a great connection for huge quantities of black tar heroin. You could be a really stand-up guy, but after a while, all the easy money gets tempting...
Sorry I did not answer your question earlier. I used that particular page in the post because it was an example of how these autogenerated pages come into being in the first place, from a post I did back when I first called Jason on the practice. It was the actual page that I had seen the noindex tag on after Jason added it. You can get to any of these autogenerated pages by running a query on Mahalo itself.
It was never an issue of how many of the empty pages were ranking per se (although quite a few do, just not that one), but rather of the sheer numbers of them that were collecting enough tiny quantities of of PageRank each, that was then (and is still, as a matter of fact) adding up to massive amounts of self-sustaining ranking power:
Question: how does somebody end up at this spam page? Google seems to do a good job of filtering stuff like this. It wasn't in the first 10 or so pages of search results for "aaron wall"