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).<p>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.<p>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.
I'm taking a page from Experts Exchange:<p>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).<p>It begins with "Experts Exchange currently displays ..."<p>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.<p>Annoying, isn't it?
I agree with him that Google's power is worrying to some extent, but with respect to Experts Exchange: Good riddance.<p>Their horrible faux pay-wall really deserve to be ranked down hard.
One of the signals that we've said that we use in the Panda algorithm that launched in April is how many users blocked a particular site.<p>A new launch last week is that you can now import blocked sites from Chrome into Google.com. That way your blocked sites will work wherever you sign in. More info: <a href="http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-blocklist-from-chrome.html" rel="nofollow">http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/export-your-sites-b...</a>
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.<p>Now it's easy for everyone. I hit the 'remove Experts Exchange from search results' button the first time I saw it.<p>I hope Google is using remove from search results as a signal in their ranking. I think it's a fair way to weight.
HAH! That was my first reaction to this. I <i>hated</i> 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.
The #1 discussion on google for filtering websites was basically "How do I stop experts-exchange from appearing in my results?"<p>However this is what the antitrust hearings were about, its scary how trafficers of information control perception of the world.
Here's my recent experience doing programming related searches:<p>- Perform multiple keyword search on Google for esoteric topic.<p>- Get a page of results that don't include all keywords (remember, can't use '+' anymore).<p>- Switch to Bing and perform search.<p>- Get page of relevant results, but EE is near top of list.<p>I can't win either way. :(
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<p>One site I can remember is bigresource.com which is an aggregator of sorts, it seems<p>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'.<p>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.<p>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 <i>started</i> 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.<p>No doubt someone will learn from his experience and take it further still.
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.<p>The update was beneficial to the interest of Google users. Those users aren't forced to use Google.<p>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.<p>(granted that a technological breakthrough seems doubtful, but often thats where the biggest surprises emerge)
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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!
Experts Exchange is responding with a new version of the site:<p><a href="http://beta.experts-exchange.com" rel="nofollow">http://beta.experts-exchange.com</a>