Have you ever done a search for a problem you’ve had only to see tantalizingly something that looks like exactly the answer you wanted before painfully realising that it’s on Experts Exchange and the page you have just clicked on says it has the answer but you don’t have an account. Sure you could sign up for their free trial for 30 days and you might even find the answer if you are lucky but what happens next time? It’s like a drug dealer: the first hit is free, but you pay for everything from then on.

Now the original design of Experts Exchange wasn’t too bad. You could ask questions if you had enough points. You could also assign points to different questions increasing in value for importance I guess. You acquired points by either paying or by successfully answering questions. The thing that annoyed me was that if you weren’t the person that was nominated as the one who answered it you got no tangible credit for your contribution even if it helps or even if the correct answer was actually wrong or perhaps not the best response.

But obviously at this point they feel that they have enough knowledge to justify not only spamming their pages with tonnes of ads but also starting to force people to pay for even more. And be aide they’ve been around for a while and have had a good reputation they’re using this plus close keyword matches on the question to continue to drive traffic.

So now with Google’s Search Wiki, we can fight back against Experts Exchange and it’s pointless entries in Google’s index. All you need to do is be logged in and when you see an Experts Exchange result in your Google search make sure you delete it from your results. My belief is that if we get enough people to blacklist and delete those entries, Google will take note and eventually lower the rank of the entries and we’ll stop seeing their results.