Quora presents a very different site to Google than it does to the reader ultimately. Google intentionally, knowingly ignores this fact and has for years. They could manually penalize Quora for breaking Google's search quality guidelines in numerous ways and they choose not to.
A user can't freely browse Quora page to page, whereas Google can. Presenting a different site to Google than you do to the user, is about as direct of a violation of their guidelines as you can get.
AFAIK, you always get the same page that was shown when coming from Google results. That IMO is enough - what is shown in the search results is an accurate reflection of the page you reach. Requiring that subsequent navigations within the site are also the same seems excessive (as you don't have the context of a results page that would make it seem misleading) and would be an overreach on Google's part IMO.
The Google spider has an entirely different experience, when going from page to page on Quora, than what the user does (someone not signed in).
Google hammers any normal site that gets caught presenting a fundamentally different experience to the user than they do the spider. Google is not unaware that Quora, Pinterest and LinkedIn present different experiences to the bot vs the user, they knowingly allow it for giant services. That's the hypocrisy and double standard.
That’s because the policy isn’t derived from first principles, it’s a flexing of relative muscles. Google knows that small sites don’t have any choice but to comply with their guidelines. They also know that if they start filtering out LinkedIn results, if people are looking for something they expect to find on LinkedIn, they’ll go and search LinkedIn, possibly even before they search Google. Google will not allow that to happen.
Also, Google doesn’t also compete with those companies. I would bet if it were someone who they were competing with on another vertical , they’d be enforcing this policy.
I agree generally speaking. Quora has raised $452 million in venture capital. It's incredible frankly. There's no actual sound business model there and never has been (which is why eight years later they still don't have a functioning business and are living on VC, while being subsidized by Google abusing its own search policies).
No sound business model? Quora has a sound business model. The same model as many VC backed SV companies.
No, it's not to simply sell ads. You build something slick and shiny, then you pump VC money into it and you keep hyping (otherwise known as "pumping") until you can get numbers that look good. You can just spend that sweet, easy VC money to buy users and spend a dollar to make 10 cents because of that "growth" you are buying.
Then, when those numbers you are buying (and also all those fake accounts you are ignoring) start looking really good, you go public, the VCs make out like bandits and all those institutional and private suckers buy those bloated shares, trade places with the VCs and slowly ride the shares back down to zero where they belong.
Do you have an example? You speak as if this is a very common pattern, but I can't think of any good examples. I can think of some that look like they might fit this pattern if they were to IPO, but that's a big if.
if you 3rd party log in w/ your google account you can browse pages the same as the spider. quora knows the google spider is the google spider, so they've got a pretty good argument of equivalence there... plus you can still open links in a new incognito tab if you want to bypass registration like I did for years (kinda clunky though, & I was definitely feeling annoyed w/ them at times too)
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en
Quora presents a very different site to Google than it does to the reader ultimately. Google intentionally, knowingly ignores this fact and has for years. They could manually penalize Quora for breaking Google's search quality guidelines in numerous ways and they choose not to.
A user can't freely browse Quora page to page, whereas Google can. Presenting a different site to Google than you do to the user, is about as direct of a violation of their guidelines as you can get.