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Comment by andy_adams | Hacker News Reader

Experts Exchange sells access to content - that's my whole point. That's literally all they do. Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK. Comparing that to assassinating babies is kinda silly, don't you think?

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"Their crime was ranking highly in Google, while Google said what they were doing was OK."

There's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. EE may have been compliant with the letter of Google's law at the time, but if you'd asked Google and Google users specifically they would've told you it was sleazy/not ok.

Google eventually understood the sleaziness and changed their policy to address this specifically. End users also understood the sleaziness and went elsewhere.

White Van speaker guys sell speakers, that's literally all they do. Their crime is their super efficient marketing - they stop their van next to you while you're walking in the street. There's no laws against that!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_van_speaker_scam

Their offense (now a crime by Google Law) was showing Google one thing (full content) and users another (squeeze pages). There's a reason Google started kicking sites out of the index for this.

If their crime was only that they ranked highly because of the text in the questions and sold access to answers, I would be okay with that, but EE decided to let Google index the _answers_ too, for SEO purposes, and then hid the answers to non-paying members via various CSS tricks, hiding them below a large wall of boilerplate footer text, etc. The babies analogy is certainly silly though.

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