Do you hate experts exchange search results in google

I hate it when I accidentally click on an experts exchange link in search listing results. I don't know how they get away with spamming google with their useless articles trying to get you to signup for their service, but apparently I am not the only one who hates their tactics. I was just looking at some information on stack overflow, and came across a link to someone mentioning a story they read on Coding Horror about Experts Exchange links and search engine optimization (SEO), and I decided to do a little further reading and research.....

• More articles about how experts exchange sucks: http://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+sucks
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/whos-your-arch-enemy.html - Look at what your enemy does wrong to figure out what you should do right in your app. Having an enemy gives you a clear marketing message. - Have an enemy
  • Despite Stack overflows attempt to be better than experts exchange, stack overflow steps on toes too:

    • The type of censorship on SO being complained about is merely an extension of our politcally correct society, which includes programmers. Flaws in experts exchange in how they fool google - you'll find all the answers hidden at the very bottom of the page. However, even this isn't always true. If you have Javascript enabled, you sometimes find the answers hidden via a script so even via Google you can't see the answers. Adding the domain to IE's Restricted Sites or using something like NoScript works pretty well to bypass that, however. It might help to look at the google cached page of an experts exchange result... The past 15 years or so have witnessed a large shift in how one should think and speak, and who not to offend. For example, you can criticize hetero-sexuals, Christians and Moslems, and those who smoke cigarettes. But you are headed for hell if you criticize homo-sexuals, Jews, or globalism. Gone are the days where you are allowed to disagree, and yet not be hateful. In other words, fit in, or you will be flagged for deletion. I think that's why the movie Matrix did so well; people literally are walking around programmed, and not knowing it. That's why I find the label on this blog, programming and human factors so appropriate in this instance. Flagged on March 23, 2009 3:10 AM

An alternative viewpoint about Experts-Exchange:

I used to vilify Experts-Exchange because of the search engine cloaking, but ever since they started including the answers at the bottom of the page (just scroll down) I've become quite grateful for the site, as the answers are very often spot on. Not sure how their model works (if the contributors have really proven themselves experts or something), but the quality of result is extremely good. And just wait until someone makes a competitor to StackOverflow, but allowing for the entire database to be open (similar to Wikipedia, which Stackoverflow often draws comparison to. I can download every single bit of data from Wikipedia, the entire history of changes, and so on. Given that it is user contributed content, it makes sense that it should be open). Suddenly StackOverflow will be the evil player, and someone else will play the good game. Dennis Forbes on March 23, 2009 9:03 AM

Maybe I need to take a fresh look at experts exchange. Tried these random queries to try and find a link to experts exchange:

• how do i change the order of columns in a sql table - nothing on 1st or 2nd page, but stackoverflow links showed up twice, and also a link to Adding Column After Another Column - SQL Server 2005
• Tried a suggested google search: change order columns table sql server (1.4M results) - no e-e links found
• update video driver - 2 links to ehow, 1 to nvidia, tribaltrouble, microsoft, no e-e on first three pages
• sort a java array - 1 stackoverflow, no e-e links in first three pages
• make my website rank higher - no e-e links
• tech questions -
  • Found this interesting link - Ask.com's top questions of 2009 - http://sp.ask.com/2009/topquestions.html

Hmmm.... Not so easy to stumble on experts exchange links anymore. Finally just searched for site:experts-exchange.com (10.7M results!)

• On the 9th page of results, found "Clients are being given a DHCPNACK : dhcpnack, clients", www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_21351081.html
  • There are comments at the bottom of the page. Not sure if the actual answer is shown in the comments, looks like this question was abandoned
• Another example: Remote Desktop through a proxy server - www.experts-exchange.com/Networking/Q_20959203.html
  • Quite a few messages back and forth between poster and someone trying to help, so the answer probably is available for free. you just have to scroll down a very long way to get to the answer.

Why can get to the answers when clicking in from google: link

• This is actually a function built in by Google originally to help newspapers etc. It's called "first page free". News sites want their content to be indexed by Google so they can get search traffic, however, Google does not want to send users to a login page, so they compromised Google will index content that is normally blocked by a pay wall in exchange the publication is required to show the full content of that page to any visitor from Google. If you try navigating to another set of answers it will probably require to you login unless you go back to Google and search for it.

More about stackoverflow philosophy:

• Stackoverflow founder writes that he is not just blogging, but also building stuff - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/introducing-stackoverflow-com.html
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/09/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us.html
• Wikipedia article has lots of information about development of stack overflow / stack exchange - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange

Alternativw to qwerty and dvorak layouts: http://colemak.com/

Other related articles:

• Joel On Software about the college experience and the importance of good writing skills for programmers

• Getting PR of a page - http://www.pagerankcode.com/download-script.html
• Can duplicate content affect my site ranking?
  • See Demystifying duplicate content penalty
• How to get pagerank for a whole list of websites
  • Probably useless information at this point: Pagerank is one of 200 factors used by google.
  • Time and effort spent trying to get backlinks probably better spent on improving content for users

Case study of developing a pagerank 5 page Let's do a quick case study. A while back ago, I wrote an article titled, Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs. I knew it was a sore spot for developers and I wanted to write something authoritative on the subject, so I spent a good deal of time researching and writing the article. I did what I was supposed to in terms of on-page SEO. I did extensive keyword research, I crafted my title to contain the keywords and also to be linkbait, I used all the right heading tags. When it came time to publish, I didn't spend time trying to get thousands of links. Instead, I submitted to Digg, Reddit, Twitter, and a few other sites, maybe 10 in total. Total time spent marketing it was maybe 45 minutes. Within a few hours, I was on front page of Reddit. The first day brought in about 15,000 visitors. To date, that page has 3,090 backlinks (according to Yahoo Site Explorer), at least 1,866 tweets (much more, but that's just what my retweet widget counts), 3660 saved bookmarks on delicious, and it brings in around 650 visitors a day through the search engines and links. The page now has a PageRank of 5. A PR5 and I didn't do anything to chase it or try to get links from high PR pages. ... Now let's take a look at what I actually got in terms of revenue from the time I spent on the article. As a rough estimate, I made $70 in advertising. To date, I haven't had any clients because of the article. It certainly took more than 2 hours to write the article, so in monetary terms, it was a big net loss. Source: efreedom