I3lackSpace

(not that anyone at Google will see this, or actually do anything about it)

If you’ve never heard of expert-exchange.com, it is a site sort of like Yahoo! answers where people can ask questions and other “experts” post answers. The differance being that expert-exchange.com charges you for a membership (but do not pay for it, you can get it for free. If you have a membership, cancel it, your wasting your money.)

Lets look at an example. Lets say your looking for information about how to setup a Cron job on your server, you do a search on google and a result from expert-exchange come up in the serps. You go to the page and you can see the question that was posted, but not the answers (bummer). But wait, you can see the answers, you just have to look at the text version of the Google cache for that page. You don’t get the fancy design of the expert-exchange site, but you get to see the answers. Thats because expert-exchange.com is cloaking and lets Google bot see the full text of the page when it crawls the site. (if you didn’t already know, the text version of Google’s cache is what google bot scraped when it crawled any given page)

So, Google, whats the deal?? Why is it OK for expert-exchange to cloak, but not me??