This article is speculative at best, but I can't say my heart didn't skip a beat at the prospect of never seeing experts-exchange.com in my search results ever again.
I hate how experts-exchange does their pages, trying to pretend you need to sign up to see the content. They even had an ad on the side that said "Tired of scrolling? Sign up!". One would hope such misleading tactics would be penalized in search results...
But on more than a few occasions, I've gotten some pretty high quality answers off their site.
If I recall correctly, it used to be the case that they only showed the answer to Googlebot and if you wanted it, you actually did have to pay (or perhaps forge your useragent)
I think Google added to their policy that if your site returned different content specifically to the Googlebot, it would have an impact on whether that site would appear in search results.
Experts-exchange got around that by making the answer appear at the bottom of the page and required a lot of scrolling.
It used to be the case that if you weren't Googlebot, you'd see some blurry scrambled text where the answer ought to be. The blurriness was created by superimposing a partially transparent image over the text, and the scrambled text was really the rot13'd answer, so it was possible to get the answer by grabbing the relevant chunk of html source and running it through a rot13 tool.
Even worse is some of the sites that have popped up duplicating content from stackoverflow. They often come up above the actual stackoverflow page for a given question and then don't even have the entire set of answers and comments that are present on the real site, or they just have a terrible layout that is hard to use. I dislike experts-exchange a lot, but at least they have original content and aren't just leaching off other sites.
Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to just ban them, I've totally gotten answers to questions from there before (at first using Google cache, until someone showed me the now-stupidly-obvious-in-retrospect scroll-down-to-the-bottom technique), so I know banning them from my listings will make my life slightly worse, and I can always ignore them.
Which, I guess, is a mindset that I think generally makes this concept not terribly useful: you can always personally ignore some domains that suck. The real issue is how many places have duplicate content, or even stupidly "reblogged"/"syndicated" content, that show up when you search for something: the domains for that are often very search-specific.
Same here. I hate that every click I make ends up at experts-exchange. I didn't even know you could find your answer by scrolling to the bottom until I read someone mention it on Hacker News.
That's just fine, today many spammers are building up domain reputation to exploit, so if we force them out of their domains it will slow them down quite a bit.
