Technical Problems & Experts-Exchange.com Starts Charging...

When a major technical issue arrises, and Microsoft haven't documented the problem on their knowledge base, we do a search on Google to find out if anyone else has had a similar problem.

Regularly you'll see a search listing with www.experts-exchange.com. Experts Exchange has been a very good resource in the past, even though it is packed with advertising!! Evidently, the revenues Experts-Exchange has been making from the advertising isn't enough (or they want to make more money).... ....as recently they have introduced a 'View Solution' button, and you have to register and pay them some money... ...it not expensive, but a good way of bringing in some extra cash.

Well, I was thinking to myself - If Experts-Exchange remove content to make it a 'pay-for-answers site' they will lose alot of rankings, as a lot of the valuable content is in the Answers.

Just as I thought, when Google spiders the site they see all the Q&A's, but when we look at the site, we just see the initial question.

Need to prove it? Just do a search for "windows xp hang error event log experts exchange". Click the first item in the Search Results and scroll down to the bottom. See the answer? Probably not. Click the back button, and then when your back on the Google results page, click the 'Cached' button under the first listing. Voila! Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you will see all the Q&A's.

This brings me to the next topic, Google's Quality Guidelines say "...[don't] present different content to search engines than you display to users...." - Clearly, this is the complete oposite to what Experts-Exchange is doing - HOWEVER, Experts-Exchange content is of extremely high-quality, and what they are doing isn't really that 'sneaky' or 'bad'. What would Google's stance on this be? At the end of the day, Experts-Exchange are displaying different content to the search engines to get better rankings - similar to what BMW did, but they aren't using sneaky spam to achieve the rankings.