Sunday, June 22, 2008

How to use Experts Exchange

I don't know about you but a lot of my web searches bring up Experts Exchange articles. When you first look at the page, it looks like you have to register to see the responses to the query. In fact it says "All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only". But look a little further down the page (OK a lot further) and you'll see all the responses without paying a thing.

It may seem surprising that the comments are all visible to anybody who hasn't registered, kind of destroying their whole business model. But I guess they have a problem. I'm guessing most of their traffic comes from search engines so they need to have some decent content to get visitors in. To do that, they need to include all the responses. They could hide the text from the browser whilst making it visible to search engines, but this would almost certainly get them removed from the search engine listings, since this would be considered as black hat SEO. So they have to include the responses visible to everybody and just hope they get enough suckers signed up with the huge blocks of text before you get to the real content.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, my colleague pointed me to it, I guess I was a little amused to see this model that they are following.