Should Google Remove Q&A Sites From Search Results?

Nov 29, 2010 - 8:17 am 8 by

Aaron Wall named Q&A sites spam of the year in Google.

We all know Google doesn't want search results in their search index. Google says they do not want to display a link to a search engine's search results as a search result for a query. Makes sense. So Google says you should block your internal search engine from being crawled. At the same time, tag clouds I believe fall under this as well.

Currently, Q&A sites like Mahalo and others do pass the check and are dominating Google's search results. The question is, should they? Aaron Wall thinks they shouldn't.

In Matt Cutts PubCon talk, which I summarized at Search Engine Land I believe he may have mentioned these types of sites. I can't remember explicitly, but I am pretty sure he said it was a debate at Google on if they should keep them in the index or drop them out or simply lower their rankings. I believe Matt felt he personally didn't want them to rank well in the index, but I believe he didn't specifically say that.

So what do you think? Should Google drop them out? Take my poll:

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

 

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