I'm happy with the reduction in Experts Exchange content in my search (I won't get into that at the moment, just to say that I usually find better quality content on other sites).
Unfortunately, I still run into a myriad of copy/paste sites, which when compared against Exerpts Exchange, are far worse, and Google's UI has made it less simple to ban the sites. I've had to manually block "unifiedpeople.ru", "mvp.itcommunity.ru", "boardreader.com" and "efreedom.com" in order to clean up search results related to topics I'm regularly seeking answers. They generally copy/paste from a variety of forums (and maybe even legally so), but they present a less up-to-date version than the site they're copying and often the code highlighting and other formatting is completely stripped rendering a very difficult to read result. Yet they often rank higher than that from which they copied.
The sites are marginally useful and were a problem before and after Panda. Google, being in a very powerful position, does have a lot of control over things like this, however, they also are going to be the most targetted. I've found, in some cases, their closest competitor (the one that used to be very blue) occasionally provides cleaner results, especially if the query involves their own products--a circumstance that was not always the case.
The comment that originally occupied this space is now behind a paywall (or, if you want to get technical, it's buried down further in the thread, and you now have to scroll through a bunch of other stuff to find it).
It begins with "Experts Exchange currently displays ..."
That's right, I've capitalized on the Hacker News "comment juice" my original comment received and the above-the-fold real estate it garnered, effectively "cloaking" my original answer.
Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access. Unless you scroll through about eight pages' worth of filler, you would never know that the answers are there. And EE would love for them not to be there, but search engines won't index them otherwise.
That's actually an improvement from some of their earlier tactics, which involved cloaking (serving one version of the site -- with the answers -- to search engines and a different version to everyone else). The only reason they're not still cloaking is because search engines have gotten wise to their methods and won't tolerate it.
In short, Experts Exchange is willing to mislead people and search engines in any way that it can get away with. So, at least in EE's case, the fact that Google has tightened the screws is great.
(I should mention that I understand EE is a business and is trying to make a profit -- but profiting from deception is what really riles me.)
> Experts Exchange currently displays its answers for free at the very bottom of its pages, but it misleads visitors into thinking that they have to pay for access.
Only if you reach the site with a google.com referrer. Without referrer there's no answers at the bottom.
I just checked this, and it's true. Googled "experts exchange fix mod_rewrite," tried a resulting question as referred and in an incognito window. Only the former had the results at the bottom.
Notably, even if you're using secure google search because you're logged in, the referrer still gets sent - so it still works. I know some people were concerned referrers didn't get passed from the new "secure if logged in" option - this seems a decent confirmation they do.
I was a customer of Experts Exchange for 3 years, from 2004 to 2006. It was useful to me when I needed information on subjects I did not know well, like Apache mod_rewrite, or some Linux sysadmin stuff.
All the same, there is a great deal that I disliked about Experts Exchanged. Two complaints stand out:
1.) sometimes the other people on the site gave me excellent help, and some even put in an extraordinary amount of time to help me. And yet, they didn't get any money for their efforts. Experts Exchange kept 100% of the money that I paid. The people who answered questions just get meaningless "points". But clearly these experts deserve some money for their time.
2.) sometimes the other people on the site did not give me any help at all. In fact, sometimes some were rude, or they would only answer "RTFM", or they would fail to read my whole question and they would post an answer to what they thought I was asking, rather than what I was really asking. Again, this is a problem that would have vanished if I'd had an easy way to send money to the people trying to help me. People would take the time to answer my question if I was paying them to read my question.
I also thought it was disgusting that so many people put so much effort into helping each other and yet Experts Exchange keeps 100% of the money made off of those efforts. I've the same criticism of StackOverflow nowadays -- they keep 100% of the profits coming in from ads on their site, rather than share the money with the experts who answer questions.
My negative experiences with Experts Exchange were an influence when I created my own question and answer site ( http://www.wpquestions.com/ ). Here, 95% of the money goes to the people who answer the question, and the distribution of the money is decided by a community vote. I think a question and answer site has the right to charge some fee to pay its bills, but since the experts who answer questions are the one's doing most of the work, most of the money should go to them.
You seem to suggest that money is a better motivator than reputation. Money is a motivator, but it's often the wrong kind of motivator. Money can bring in people who do it just for the money. Especially as the money that any site can pay for it's experts is usually much-much less than the expert earns in its daily job.
I applaud that you have created a site that tries to compensate the effort to its contributors... I just hope that you have managed to tailor the site to avoid the problems that money can bring.
Nothing I wrote suggested that in any way. You are reading a message into my words that simply isn't there. Rather, just the opposite: the top experts on WPQuestions.com have often written to me and said that the reputation that they gained on WPQuestions.com is worth far more to them than the money. More so, when they talk about WPQuestions.com on their own personal sites, they do so to advertise the fact that they have public reputation that is established on WPQuestions.com. Consider what Denzel Chia, our top expert, say about us on his own site:
"This is where I answer questions and get paid! Most of my clients came from here!"
Clearly, his reputation on the site matters to him, it's not wholly a matter of the money that he earned, it's also he's proud of the work he did and he wants people to go and look at how knowledgeable he is.
Same with Ivaylo Draganov, who links to his profile on my site from his site: http://druuf.com/
I don't think money is more powerful than reputation as a motivator, but I do think the 2 of them together can be combined in powerful ways, perhaps so powerful that people sometimes find the implications unsettling.
I do understand what you mean when you write:
> I just hope that you have managed to tailor the site to avoid the problems that money can bring
That's why the money is distributed by a vote. So that people can give public recognition to what they think was a good answer. All votes on the site are public, so if you vote $10 to what you thought was a really good answer, everyone on the site sees that you are voting $10 to that answer. It's a form of applause: a way of saying "Well Done". But votes carry more weight when they are backed up with money, rather than just being votes for something like reputation points. Or rather, votes carry more weight when they impact real world events, as opposed to those situations where they only impact a system of relations that only exist on a single web site. There are a lot of systems of voting in the world, and some impact upon real world events. Basing voting on money on a site is a way of tying the voting on that site to concerns that are important in the wider world.
As to the overall amount paid, it has apparently worked out pretty well for a number of the top experts. I cover the details in this old video from November of 2010:
People don't use services like EE or SO to make money, they do it because if feels good to help someone, and it's a great place to pick up and learn new stuff.
Also, I think you highly overrate how much SO makes from advertisements.
The only reason Stack remains free is because of the large cash infusions they received from VCs. As soon as they burn through it without coming up with a viable replacement that still allows free access, they will begin charging or they will disappear. One one site makes money from ads and it rhymes with Moogle.
Stack Overflow is also a business and also trying to make money doing the same thing, but it does it in a way that’s much better for the site user. I’m not surprised that it’s doing better than EE in the search results these days.
Part of the problem, though, is that they don't always show you the same results as the search engine sees. I've just started using the SSL version of Google search, and now I no longer see any answers on the EE pages, where I did before.
It looks like they only display the answers in the bare minimum number of case necessary to still get search rankings, rather than displaying them for all google referrers.
True, but it still does break google's requirement that the page Google sees must be the same as the one Google's user sees (which was the original reason they did this anyway).
That's not really fair. At one time, cloaking data was a good way to get found and still put up a pay wall. They built a business around being able to do this. Shady folks turned this practice into a method of deception.
Experts exchange was only hiding from view REAL data that they were selling access to, and to let us know they had the data we needed, they found a way to show it to google.
At least they didn't fill pages with bogus questions without answers and a ton of keywords.
The only part of EE I don't care for is that they want us to pay for data they didn't create, however, the experts are probably aware they will not get paid when answering.
I strongly disagree that cloaking behind-paywall pages is ever "good".
If I'm searching for a specific term, I want to see pages that are relevant to that term when I click the links, not pages that ask for my credit card and that may or may not (probably not) show me a relevant page after I've been charged.
Experts Exchange was a fairly decent site very long ago, but it sucks horribly now and has for years and has nobody to blame for their downfall but their own deceptive practices and lack of vision in terms of alternate revenue models.
I'm glad Stack Overflow is totally eating their lunch. Good riddance.
I totally agree. Stack Overflow is awesome and a great alternative to EE.
When I searched for a programming answer and EE came up, most times the questions and answers were relevant. I never opted to pay for the service, and I stopped clicking the links to EE because I didn't want to pay. However, that didn't mean they didn't have the relevant answer, and I just had to pay for it if I wanted it.
I don't find this deceptive, just a form of advertising.
Nobody EVER said it had to be. They had data. It was GOOD data, and they wanted to be paid for it, but they had to tell Google they had it so people could find it. It's how advertising works. Look what we have! Come buy it.
Advertising is saying "free ice cream this weekend at EE's ice cream shop". What EE does though is say "free ice cream" in their ad on tv, and then inform customers at the cash register that the ice cream is only free if you purchase a $50 plastic spoon as well.
When they show the content to free for google, that implies to me that the content is not behind a paywall. Showing different things to Google and to me is deceptive. It would be like a manufacturer someone finding out where Consumer Reports buys their test cars, and sending special high quality cars there, while selling the rest of us normal crappy cars.
yes, but to extend the metaphor, it's as though they offered a reporter free icecream and tricked him into writing a piece about it in the paper, rather than purchasing an ad.
Downvotes are for comments that don't belong on the site because they don't add anything to the discussion. I personally have found this discussion very interesting. Dpcan should not be downvoted just for making an unpopular argument.
In fact, dpcan has managed to convince me that he's right. When I search for the title of a book, and I get to see a preview of a few pages, it is a form of advertising. It's not "wrong" or "mischievous" or "evil" or any other negative, it's just how advertising works.
The reason you are all upset is because that's not how Search Engines, in particular, worked. With book previews on Amazon, we're used to it. What EE did was try a new tactic, built for the web, to advertise their product. Of course we didn't like it - when has anyone ever liked paying for something?
Nowadays, what they do has been ruled to be wrong. The "rules of the game", as defined by Google (the authority here, apparently), say that they aren't allowed to do that. They find "tricky" ways of doing it, which sucks. But remember, these rules are being written live - you can't hold EE at fault for trying to "hack" a system, and you definitely can't fault them for not living up to rules that never existed.
I agree, I don't understand the down voting on dpcan.
There seems to be two different complaints about EE.
1. They show data to Google but hide it from visitors unless they pay. Personally I see nothing wrong with this as explained by edanm. They are a business and this is their business model. They use a search engine as a form of free advertisement. If the search engines didn't have a problem with this then I don't understand why potential visitors should. If you don't like having to pay for the content then go elsewhere. Having results in the search engine that have data behind a paywall is the problem of the search engine, not the site that has the paywall. The data is still relevant even though you can't see it immediately on clicking the link.
2. They show one set of data to search engines but show a different set to visitors. To me, this is a no-no as long as they are actually doing this in the described manner. If by showing different data is because of the paywall and they do match up after you pay, then I see no problem. But in the end if they do not match then there's a problem and I would hope that the search engines would discourage this type of thing.
I think people need to be more clear on what exactly they are complaining about.
Plus, as edanm states, you shouldn't down vote someone simply because the statement is unpopular yet relevant to the topic.
That's still deception. Seems obvious to me that the reason search engines would penalize sites that put up real data behind firewalls is because users don't want to see them in their search results. To show search engines different data to circumvent this is deceptive.
Are you saying that if your content is in Google's database it's required to be free? As a site owner, I have the right to decide whether or not my data is available for free, but it is there, and you should know it's there, so I have to somehow get found in search engines.
Think of it this way. You search for an image in Google - you are presented with sites that sell licenses to stock photos. Is this any different?
Showing different things to search engines and users is deceptive. You're misrepresenting yourself to the search engine.
I want search engines to penalize sites that put content behind firewalls, because those sites are less relevant to me. If the site is good enough to overcome that penalty because the content is so good that it gets enough google juice anyway, awesome. But they should still be penalized for hiding stuff behind the paywall.
It's not a moral judgment on paywalling content, it's a practical one. As a search engine user, I don't want Google to show me paywall stuff unless it's really, really good. So Google is making the appropriate ranking by penalizing paywalled content. But if you trick Google by showing googlebot something that you don't show users, that's obviously deceptive. Which I will make a moral judgment on.
The only part of EE I don't care for is that they want us to pay for data they didn't create
In theory they provide a service that has value, that is a platform where questions can get answered. Just because they didn't pay the "experts" doesn't mean their overall concept is not worth paying for.
Now, I'm not saying that their implementation is worth paying for, I just don't buy the idea that because they didn't pay for their data it's wrong for them to charge for their service.
That reminds me, have you removed the blocking function or does it only work in Chrome?
I tried to find a manual for a particular dishwasher today. Holy crap was the search results useless. With the exception of a site which didn't load and one which was a list of people who wanted to know if anybody else had the manual all other results of the three first pages where made for adsense sites or sites designed to harvest email address.
Which would have been one thing, but not one of them had the damn manual (one tried to suggest the manual for a Macbook air!?).
So it seems you still have a long way to go with Panda.
But the reason I ask is that I couldn't figure out how to ban those sites (I was using my iPad at the time).
For me, it works such that you go to a crappy site, navigate backwards to the search results and then a link "- Block all crappysite.com results" appears. It also mentions you need to be "signed in to search".
Why doesn't Google block sites manually (sites that are obviously bad)?
Off-topic, but I've always thought this is the main reason Google Blog Search isn't very good. In the quest to make an all-algorithm blog search, Google sacrificed having one at all. If they had simple restricted the search to blogspot.com, wordpress.com, and typepad.com, and applied the normal spam filters, it could have been pretty good!
This does not mean that every kind of discrimination is equally good. Dunking a site by an algorithm (sensible disclaimers apply) looks much better in court than a decision made by a human. The latter is vulnerable to questioning based on (supposed) hidden motives.
Please can I draw your attention to this Stack Exchange question, about Google Chrome blocking (as a potential phishing site) a question on Security Stack Exchange?
>Both Stack Overflow and The Hyphenated Site (EE) sites are affected, EE in fact goes way down and Super User also notices a drop after reaching a record in the same time while Stack Overflow goes sharply down
For an indication they are not so bad. They trail behind usually, but for big swings they seem to be good enough indicators. Both EE and SO went down after Panda and never recovered. So did tons of other sites, genuine or not. And a lot of spammy sites (there appeared a ton of new (Russian) sites in the index using subdomains (x.bla.com) instead of directories (bla.com/x) which seems to work now in fooling Google that it's 'quality' and sites with no own content (Markosweb as nice example) only grew larger.
So Google is a long way from achieving their goal while good sites get punished.
I don't think it has anything to do with Googles algorithm. Over the years, I've had various browser plugins to hide EE results from my searches. Various upgrades meant I had to find new plugins every 10 months or so.
Now it's easy for everyone. I hit the 'remove Experts Exchange from search results' button the first time I saw it.
I hope Google is using remove from search results as a signal in their ranking. I think it's a fair way to weight.
I hope Google looks at "remove from search results" but I hope they don't allow that button to remove the results from the official ranking. That's easier to game than PageRank was.
HAH! That was my first reaction to this. I hated doing a search and ending up on that site, and they owned a lot of page 1 results for many keywords. I cringed every time I would realize I had ended up on that site, could see the clearly user-provided questions, and then the annoying way they hid the answers and begged for money. If that's the result of Panda, Google gets a big cheer from me.
Could someone explain to me why people even consider results collected via third-party browser toolbar to be relevant in any way[1]? I mean... I don't remember ever seeing anyone in IT with a browser toolbar, and I remove them on the spot from my non-IT friends' browsers. Call it selection bias, but I think that most of the time someone has a toolbar of this type is when one's IT friends haven't have time to get to ones computer and remove it.
[1] - this is a serious question that bothers me; I can't see how this kind of selection gives any kind of representative sample.
I don't understand why something either has to be totally perfect information or totally useless.
Yes, Alexa information is pretty bad. Yes, it is easily faked. Yes, it isn't representative. Yes, browser toolbar usage is probably declining.
However, that doesn't mean that Alexa information cannot be used as an indication of big traffic trends considering there is a difference between absolute traffic levels and relative changes in traffic levels.
To give a different example. Let's say that you have a website with decent traffic levels and you collect browser usage statistics (e.g. 50% IE, 40% FF, 10% Chrome). Of course those are not representative for global browser usage. But if Chrome usage doubles for that group, it can be used as an indication for a trend in global browser usage.
Does it matter for this purpose if there results are fairly terrible? I'd be surprised if they were so bad that the reporting off the loss of half their traffic overnight didn't at least resemble some real loss of traffic.
well i wasn't talking about this case particularly.. i was talking in general alexa isn't considered nearly a credible source of getting info about sites. The obvious reason is that most people don't use toolbar. (browsers like chrome don't even have toolbars, browser toolbars are ancient)
Dev-related search is difficult for a lot of reasons:
- you need to search for "<:<" or the F# "as" keyword
- there's lots of mailing list mirrors (gmane, osdir, nabble, markmail) with lousy UI's and google seems to push their Google groups search hits way down to page 2, or "Repeat search with duplicate results shown"
- new stackoverflow clones or whatever uncomplementary term keep popping up
Google do a remarkable job at accurately guessing what most people want from a bunch of search terms. It's not always right, but still, it is impressive.
Way way back the reason Google succeeded over other SE for me was that they required all terms and that they made sure relevancy by checking that the terms were used in proper context on the page (eg not stuffed, not font-color hidden, etc.).
Now, it seems I can't do a straight search, even quoted text returns results that don't contain the string I'm looking for it's highly frustrating.
It must be working for others but when I need to use Google for anything serious now (rather than a general query) it is a lot harder to get it to return good results at the top of the SERPs.
The worst are the 1st-result-has-none-of-your-keywords type queries. Aagh! At least they used to placate you with "pages pointing to this result use that keyword".
To me the worst was when Google would just silently drop a search term. I was getting a page of hits with none of them having one of my terms anywhere.
Google really needs to give a secret power user page, where there are no word substitutions or dropping.
But, like I say, that's not most people. For most people the fact that Google can search for C++ or can tell the difference between some words or can include useful alternates for search terms is fantastic.
I don't think the Panda update got it right with respect to the duplicate content problem though. I still see a bunch of StackOverflow content scrapers rank as high as StackOverflow and basically link back to StackOverflow. To the same post that is ranked number 1 for that particular query. Don't have examples right away - checking my history for those instances
One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems
The larger problem being, sites with duplicate content still rank as high as the original.
This is an excellent set of comments, they go all over the map from 'their evil' to 'its just business' to 'I miss them'.
My feeling is that Experts Exchange is just one of a number of new enterprises for which they are trying to price the value of information. The marginal cost of providing the same information to a second, third, or 10,000th question seeker is the same (and quite small) and the value of that information varies between seekers as does the value of time. So we see a variety of strategies for pricing that value.
The reference market in general seems to be a candidate for this sort of disruption, and while many found EE distasteful my understanding is that Joel started StackOverflow because he valued the information in EE but found the pricing (in terms of crap he had to wade through) extortionate. So he took the concept one step forward.
No doubt someone will learn from his experience and take it further still.
New? EE started in 1996. If anyone's a copycat, it's SO, and they weren't even the first.
EE went the venture capital route in the last century, and did exactly what SO is doing now: burning through money trying to build eyeballs with no business plan other than taking venture capital money. It failed then, and it will fail now because the revenue stream doesn't support the increased costs.
EE tried the advertising model in the early 2000s: get lots of eyes, sell ads and pay the bills with that. It failed then, and it will fail now; only a few companies have sufficient traffic to be profitable (Google and Facebook lead the list, but everyone else needs some other revenue, or needs to share content (like the NYTimes does) to help offset costs.
The only business model that works AND SCALES is to charge for services rendered, like your cable company does. like your ISP does and like your plumber does.
Did EE implement it in the best possible way? Nope. Instead it followed Google's rules for SEO, and got punished for it because it was better at it than anyone else. So it's rebuilding itself: http://beta.experts-exchange.com . Did its members like it? Nope, but that didn't stop the company from doing it, and now they're listening to their members more because it turns out the members' warnings were right -- because they've been there before.
When SO starts putting all kinds of ads in your face and you start complaining like frightened banshees and nothing happens, you can cash in your reputation points and find another site that will have the same magic bullet SO does. When Quora starts tracking every little thing you do to "personalize the experience" just remember that its roots are in Facebook -- and the goal is to turn you into the product, because that's what advertising based sites do; they can't sell ads without it.
EE is honest. You're not the product; you're the customer, even if -- especially if -- you're the one answering questions.
I'm a big outposken critic of Google, I've disliked them for a long time. But IMO I see no wrong here. If your business relies on Google to survive you don't have a good business, you need to do some introspection and reevaluate your business.
The update was beneficial to the interest of Google users. Those users aren't forced to use Google.
And even though Google is huge and gets great boons because of its size, it is also on a knife edge that could come toppling down because of a technological break through, or advertising collapse. In all respects Facebook is big enough to force that to happen (at least on an advertising front), but it could always come from an unexpected area as well.
(granted that a technological breakthrough seems doubtful, but often thats where the biggest surprises emerge)
The update was beneficial to Google, not necessarily to its users. A lot of Google properties (Demand Media, anyone?) that are clearly content farms climbed up the rankings while good sites like Stack, DaniWeb, and yes...Experts Exchange got nailed. In DaniWeb's case, she got nailed twice by two different updates.
The problem here is Google is selling the ads and also determining the traffic to the ads. It's too much in one place and ripe for abuse and the abuse seems to be happening
The issue with Panda is that it tilts the playing field towards brands. This, along with predictive searches and Google-owned companies filling out search engine results, makes it much harder for newer sites to come in and gain traffic.
While it's good that scraping sites get heavily hit, what's not so good is that it will become very difficult for a future startup to gain a foothold in an existing industry. The likes of stackoverflow overtaking EE in a short time frame might become less in the future.
Much of Google search results is becoming useless with spam pollution, but at the same time, they have to be careful they don't just solidify searches around already 'knowns'. The true utility of search is turning up unexpected good results from time to time.
To your point, Demand Media now focuses primarily on putting their content on brand sites and rev-sharing. See traveltips.usatoday.com, for example. There's always someone working an angle to game Google.
Though I worry about how much power Google wields, I think this is a bad example. EE and its ilk are designed to rank as high as possible on Google specifically. Their whole product was (more or less) SCO - if they could have ranked higher without content, their pages would be empty aside from ads. Their only purpose is to draw eyeballs to ads - if they didn't appear on Google, no one would use them.
Ranking aggregation lower than original sources is a reasonable optimization and the huge traffic impact was caused by the unusual entanglement with Google's specific algorithmic implementation.
Experts Exchange is not scamming anyone: you, google, whomever. All they did was play Google's game by Google's rules with first-click free and did it better than anyone else for a long time. Now that Google has changed the rules, EE will change too. There's a new site in beta testing and given the Panda restrictions it will almost have to be a freemium model in order to compete.
Well they're right about the new algorithm preferring high-quality sites; now I no longer have to manually ignore results from expert sexchange anymore!
Unfortunately, I still run into a myriad of copy/paste sites, which when compared against Exerpts Exchange, are far worse, and Google's UI has made it less simple to ban the sites. I've had to manually block "unifiedpeople.ru", "mvp.itcommunity.ru", "boardreader.com" and "efreedom.com" in order to clean up search results related to topics I'm regularly seeking answers. They generally copy/paste from a variety of forums (and maybe even legally so), but they present a less up-to-date version than the site they're copying and often the code highlighting and other formatting is completely stripped rendering a very difficult to read result. Yet they often rank higher than that from which they copied.
The sites are marginally useful and were a problem before and after Panda. Google, being in a very powerful position, does have a lot of control over things like this, however, they also are going to be the most targetted. I've found, in some cases, their closest competitor (the one that used to be very blue) occasionally provides cleaner results, especially if the query involves their own products--a circumstance that was not always the case.