[jawns]

The most egregious example of a huge site doing things that smaller sites are not allowed to do is ...

GOOGLE!

Recently, I've seen its "survey wall" cropping up on more and more sites.

It works like this:

You do a Google search. You see a link to an article you want to read. You click through.

You're met with a message that tells you that if you want to actually read the page, you have to complete a survey.

And the whole thing is powered by Google: http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/10/31/googles-latest-conten...

Remember back when Experts Exchange tried to pull the same nasty tactic -- have its cake (get indexed in Google search results) and eat it too (hide that content behind a paywall)? Remember how slimy it was, and how Google penalized it several times, as it tried various other ways to cloak its content?

Well ... Google is doing exactly the same thing.

[stevenleeg]

I've actually noticed Chegg doing the exact same thing experts exchange did.

For example, if I'm looking up homework help for second order differential equations, I'd see something like this[1] in the Google results. Does anyone know why is this not being penalized?

[1] – http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/1-f...

[digitalengineer]

Same as Quora. I can google it and clcik the link to it, but then it's blurred and I need to login to see answers: "You must be signed in to read this answer."

[blauwbilgorgel]

In my experience Quora ranked a LOT higher before these shenanigans. I do not think Quora is getting the best of both worlds here: High organic rankings and many user sign-ups.

[Keats]

append ?share=1 to the URL and you can see everything unblurred

[gk1]

On the flip side of this is Google Consumer Surveys[0], which is actually quite useful. You set up a survey, specify your target demographics, and Google takes care of finding participants. How does it get participants? With the popups you mentioned.

[0] https://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

[smackfu]

I would hope that ads are generally useful to the people placing them.

[fear91]

The best thing is they punish you for "ads above the fold" and actively de-index "scraper websites". Matt Cutts preaches how bad it is constantly.

Ironically, what Google could be summed up as is a scraper website absolutely FULL of ads above the fold ( http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2012/01/... ). If you place ads like Google does, your website won't rank shit.

[blauwbilgorgel]

Google's search result pages don't rank high either. I agree that it is a negative, but I do not see the double standard.

To equate Google.com with a scraper site that scrapes StackOverflow and tries to outrank the original by changing publishing date and other nasty tricks is not too sane. There is no double standard and there is no fair comparison.

It is not Matt Cutts who preaches how bad it is; it is the users (you and me) who are complaining about this and asking Google to take action. It is the user metrics showing something is wrong with the quality or experience.

Finally it is about intent. The spirit of the guidelines. It is only when blackhat spammers start exploiting techniques, that those techniques become punishable offences or are taken away. Google gives us popular search keywords? Spammers will automatically create crappy pages to target those. You can get a site to link to you by writing a quality article for their visitors? Spammers will write or outsource crappy articles and ruin article marketing for everyone. You are a charity and you want to create a widget with a link back to your site? Bummer... better add nofollow, because spammers used baity widgets like "Which zombie am I?" to link back to their clients' websites with targeted unrelated keywords.

If you go to the Google search results do you think: Damn what a commercial site! Animated ads everywhere! And all these scraped results they are trying to rank for without giving credit to the content creators...?

"Ads above the fold" are usually Google's own advertisements. They ding webmasters for forcing their own ads onto their readers. So it is a decision about quality and reputation, not money or bullying small sites.

Do the all-things-being-equal test. Two sites equal in all regards, yet one has animated advertisements above the fold. Which one would satisfy your users the most? It's a tiny factor, but it is there. And it is there for a good, not a nefarious, reason.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Weird - I have never seen this, and I don't have an adblocker installed, javascript disabled, etc. I wonder if this is geolocation- or browser-specific?

[streptomycin]

As of last year, it only showed surveys to users from US/UK/Canada. Not sure how much things have changed by now, but it's definitely not global yet. I also heard that it didn't work in Safari, but I'm not sure if that was just a temporary thing.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Still weird: Chrome, UK, never seen. Ah, well - hopefully it stays that way!

[streptomycin]

A paywall and a surveywall are not "exactly the same thing". The surveys take about 5 seconds to complete. It's more like how many videos on YouTube and elsewhere show an ad before playing, except those video ads are typically much longer and more annoying.

[hagbardgroup]

It's not really cloaking, because it shows a snippet first. It's a good product for publishers who don't want to clog their pages with display ads. Would you rather that, or a godawful interstitial?