arghyle

I have been pretty interested in Mahalo since it was first announced so a few days ago I finally signed up for the Greenhouse. This is their program where they are paying people, supposedly qualified people, to write search engine result pages (SERPs). All the result pages on Mahalo are generated by real people so in addition to full-timers, they are supplementing the results with part-time Greenhousers.

The experience would, I thought, give me a unique insight into the workings of Mahalo and a I stood to make $10 from each SERP, so I figured it was worth the few minutes that one SERP would take.

The sign-up process was very easy. It took about five minutes and I heard back a day or two later. From what I have seen they are not turning anyone down, but that could just be a matter of who I have talked to about it.

I won’t get into the boring process of picking a topic or learning their style guidelines or using wiki code, but what I did learn was the making a good SERP take a long time. I originally planned to finish the page in about 30 minutes, which seemed reasonable given that wiki code is easy and I am well-versed in using Google and other tools. Anyway, this wasn’t even close. By the time I was done I had put about 2 hours of time into that one page.

Why so long? Well part of it is my fault- I should have followed the style guidelines more closely. In my defense, the document is really long and is not laid out particularly well, plus many of their conventions seem strange (but I guess they have all been devised by an SEO team). The people at Mahalo that I emailed with had me revise the document three times before I could sent it in for the final quality control check! This was a bit annoying, but the people were extremely patient and courteous- if it wasn’t for their pleasantness I would have quit when faced with the revisions.

One minor annoyance was that after the page was up and approved the footer said, “This search result page was written by: Dave” when in fact all he did was edit it and adds some dates. Above this it does say that the page was created by me and curated by this Dave fellow, but that is in a special “Greenhouse” section. In actuality the SERP that is shown is Dave’s final edit and mine still resides in the Greenhouse…

Overall, the experience was not bad. If I attempt another SERP I am guessing it will take about half the time of the first one, but I still won’t be blowing through them and I know I will get stucking doing a revision or two (which takes time because you have to wait a until the next day for an email if you are doing them late at night).  This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, or even a way to make anything more than pocket change, but that is no surprise. I am glad I gave it a shot and I feel that now I have a much better understanding of what goes into a site like Wikipedia or Mahalo.

As for the $10, it will be probably going towards hosting. Or, if I can figure out how to change the setting (I was feeling greedy at the time), I will have them send it to Wikipedia….

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