Interestingly, they used to just blur their text with effect, and the actual text was available in the source. I am not certain what prompted the change, but they now screenshot the text, blur it, and put the screenshot (!) in the page, preventing view source snooping.
Since that started, I stopped reading Quora entirely and I always avoid their links. Occasionally there is some great content I can't find elsewhere, and I won't sign up to a service that is so abusive. This is a great trick. Thanks.
Yes, Quora are really quite obnoxious and spammy in many ways.
It's a shame they went down this route after a promising start. They could have taken the StackOverflow route but chose to be Expert-Sex-Change instead.
In case some people are not aware, Benjamin refers to the closed and paid Experts Exchange community, whose domain name is particularly easy to misread.
Only if they're serving up a different page to Google so that it can index that text. If Googlebot gets the same HTML someone clicking on the search result would get, your site can be as user-unfriendly as you want.
They used do exactly that: I started reporting them as webspam after a few iterations of seeing text snippets which were blocked by the nags when I opened the page. At one point the blocker was pure-JavaScript so you could simply disable it but that doesn't provide the negative feedback which abusive practices deserve.
That was when I cancelled my account: they're doing this because someone decided it would be profitable. I don't want to subsidize an unethical business with my content or help them by viewing ads or sharing their pages. This has yet to be a problem in any way: the amount of “must-read” Quora content has remained zero.
Obscuring content to non-bot users is still cloaking, I believe. Google's goal is to mimic a human user clicking through links and if the experience the bot gets is markedly different than others, that's a problem.
"Cloaking is essentially serving different content to users than Googlebot".
I'm a user who cannot view Quora content that Googlebot has indexed even though it was a result Google said matched my query. This result is therefore unusable without modifying the URL or signing in. That is the definition of different content, HTML/CSS/JS or other semantics be damned, and a poor user experience. And that's something Google is allegedly trying to avoid.
The Matt Cutts video also talks about mobile user experiences. If I worked for Quora, I'd pay close attention as I cannot view the site at all without getting their mobile app even though, again, Google said "you should check out this Quora link for this query".
•Using white text on a white background
•Locating text behind an image
•Using CSS to position text off-screen
•Setting the font size to 0
•Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example,
a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph
`
When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links,
look for anything that's not easily viewable by visitors of your site.
Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than
visitors?
From that enumeration none seems to apply. There is an image with blurred text, but no bad SEO practice to game a search engine bot.
You're right about the pages still appearing with high ranks on specific queries, but on the other hand I attribute it more to Google bombing than page relevance. At least I'm pretty sure Googlebot finds nothing to read on Quora, so the effect must be due to incoming links.
Since Googlebot will dutifully obey canonical, we now have link-bait to the original question with obscured content instead of the non-obscured answers. Again, this is gaming the system. You may disagree, and Quora may as well, regardless that's what's happening.
Edit: Link to webmaster guidelines on rel="canonical" :
Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical
content and suggest to Google: "Of all these pages with identical content,
this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."
Quora is gaming the system. Period. I won't pursue this point any further.
I've just tested and I don't see any image, the html is right there and just clicking will make the lightbox go away. I never see it anyway cause I'm signed in but I tried in incognito mode and it was fine. Not sure why there's so much misinformation and hate on HN when it comes to quora.
I just tried this url in incognito mode. When I click anywhere outside of the light box, it goes away and I get the full text version. Am I being served some special html for my IP? Doubt it.
Edit: just tried with a proxy IP and it worked too. Did you guys actually try to click outside of the light box?
Since it's an automated service, it doesn't click away the lightbox, but if you scroll down you will see the text in the background are all blurred images.
The reason you don't see an image is because you're signed in or you happen to be viewing an unblurred answer...
As someone who has never used this site I can assure you that answers are a blurred PNG with the title "Sign up to view the contents of this answer."[1]
I clicked on this link and clicking outside of the lightbox anywhere on this page makes the blurred image disappear. Tried on both firefox and chrome in incognito mode so signed off. Did you try to click anywhere on the page?
Since that started, I stopped reading Quora entirely and I always avoid their links. Occasionally there is some great content I can't find elsewhere, and I won't sign up to a service that is so abusive. This is a great trick. Thanks.