3 ms·
Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more than SEO spam with no content?
by lukejduncan 15y ago
Maybe this was before my time, but was experts-exchange ever anything more than SEO spam with no content?
- RegEx 15y agoIt took me way too long to realize this, but there were actually answers below the huge wall of links on E-E pages!
- Piskvorrr 15y agoThis was not implemented until Google has temporarily kicked them off the indexes for black-hat SEO back in 2008, IIRC. Before that, the answers were not physically present on the page served to humans, but they were on the page that was served to Googlebot. This is called "content cloaking" and is punishable by a Google-ban (which takes at least weeks to get reversed).
- nas 15y agoI think at first they showed answers. Later they only showed answers to GoogleBot and tried to get you to jump through hoops to see them. Finally, Google smacked them down and they implemented a tricky system where you had to scroll and long way to see the answers. The site was designed to try to get you to sign-up or pay to see answers. Overall it was a sleazy site, IMHO. Occasionally I would find useful answers there but eventually I just blacklisted them from my Google results. StackOverflow is miles better than EE ever was.
- jasonkester 15y agoSure. Early on, it was a scraper that pulled down usenet content and rebranded it as its own with ads over the top. I first found them via a Google search on my own name, to discover that in addition to comp.sci.*, I'd also been answering questions there.
- Nick_C 15y agoYep, same here. Sort of amusing to see some historical revisionism going on here from the E-E people. I don't doubt that there were some genuine contributors, but claiming other's hard work as their own tainted E-E's brand for me. P.S. For the young 'uns, Google Groups isn't. It is usenet re-branded. Google is now doing the same thing!