Most Annoying Google Search Results? Empty Answer Sites

Jul 9, 2009 - 8:43 am 8 by
Filed Under Google

Remember a little back Matt Cutts of Google posted that he wanted the Google search results to remove empty review sites from the listings? Recently, during my Google searches, I have been landing on sites that have answers, but require you to login and pay to view those answers.

This has happened to me several times over the course of the week, but let me share one example with you. I was looking on how to mess around with imap outlook folders and found a Google result at, you guessed it, Expert Exchange. Here is a screen shot:

Expert Exchange and Google

Great, this is my exact question, I click over and what do I see? I see a teaser to sign up to view the answer:

Expert Exchange and Google

I cannot tell you have annoying this search experience has been for me. It makes me want to completely remove all expert-exchange.com results from my search experience at Google. I know this is not new, it comes up very often in the forums. But now it is bothering me personally, so I thought I take a recent thread and vent about it.

Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Update: As noted by Adam in the comments, if you actually keep scrolling and scrolling, you will see all the answers listed there. I assume they are doing this to not cloak content to Google, but it still seems wrong.

 

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