Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed.
"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website"
"Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking"
"Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website"
"Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading"
If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worker gave me any of those questions, I would answer it by giving them the link to google's recommendation page about SEO, while warning that google is a private company that do not disclose their methods in indexing website. I can guess and speculate how they think or what their intention are, but any advice would only reflect how I think it works today, and google may at any time change how they index websites.
And I consider Google+SO the best programming tool ever created.
wrt Closed Questions, simple heuristic - if the page has lots of visits, lots of upvotes and is high in google for common searches do not close the topic. Clearly there exists a market for this question for many people, even if it boggles super-users' sensibilities.
For your information, the Google specification [1] is implemented in google, bing, msnbot, yandex, pinterest and mail.ru bots. Making the solution compatible with the other bots is a matter of adding 2 lines in the server configuration.
I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript.
Maybe I'm just off-base, but I'd consider all of those off-topic for SO. It's not a programming or programming tools question, it's a "how does Googlebot work?" question.
The knowledge would certainly be useful to many people, but it is outside of SO's scope as it is defined.
Don't you think that implementing the Google crawling scheme [1] (i.e. returning a snapshot of an Ajax application) is a programming or programming tools question?
Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another.
I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question:
The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers.
This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.
Very often when searching (with google) for subjective things you'll find a closed stackoverflow link high up in the results. I know stackoverflow isn't appropiate for those questions but i still keep going to those results. I understand their position, it's just annoying. This is an example of something i found today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric...
When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow.
They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange.
Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.
I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.
This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.
>> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology."
That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed.
It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
