Gregg Hilferding

Who wouldn't enjoy Rand (or for that matter, any SEM professional) posting a series of myspace-esque self portraits?

Tiny problem though... I'd love to give feedback on the posts. There's even a mechanism for doing so with the little "Do you like this post? Yes No" links in the feed. Unfortunately, clicking them turns up this result:

So is the feedback mechanism's goal to get people to sign up? Or is it to get feedback on the posts? Perhaps you'd only want to publicly display the feedback from signed in visitors but I can't imagine a reason not to still collect the feedback from other visitors.

A minor point to be sure, but a good opportunity to think about what purpose the different features of your web site are intended to serve. Are those features optimized for that purpose?

DaveN hints at the technique today.

If you want to see exactly what sorts of spamming he's talking about with other sites search pages, some simple Google searches will show you. (You'll always need to show omitted results when manually typing in these searches.)

• site:weather.com inurl:search/partner
• site:search.orange.co.uk inurl:all?q=

Of course, I tend to trust what DaveN puts out... if he says this is working then I'm sure it's having some effect. That said, it's gotta be a hole that Google can plug pretty easily. Unless this is a case where search engine engineers are blind to detecting what a search engine result page looks like. ;)

It's rare that I get personally frustrated by cloaking. After all, I expect those types of shenanigans from Web -2.0 companies like the New York Times.

But Experts Exchange? Holy crap, do they expect to not just frustrate people by literally scrambling the text of answers until you register?

An screenshot of scrambling shenanigans (Actual URL):

See how they cleverly position a semi-transparent GIF over the scrambled text to heighten the illusion of inconvenience? Of course, if we delve deeper we learn that the scrambled text is using a highly idiotic encryption cipher, ROT13.

No, no, they save the really clever programming for the cloaking of the unscrambled content to search engines. Oh yeah, that's what that page is supposed to look like. I guess Googlebot forked over the $12.95 a month to see giant animated banner ads for eBay and MSN Live.

Let's face it, Experts Exchange has always been a horrific hodgepodge of self-advertisements. I'm quite certain the first dozen or so times I visited the site I never even finished the multipage scrolling trek to the first "comment," thinking the site only existed to offer "questions" while cross-promoting it's other services. Even the new redesign is still chock full o' self-love.

If I had more time I'd write the Greasemonkey script to disable that transparent gif and rot13 the comments back to being readable. But, honestly, I think I'd rather just never visit their site again.

Good luck with your re-design Experts Exchange!