Ever wanted to see, what is posted on paid forums, but never wanted to pay for it? Good news - it’s possible and very easy!

Quick start guide

Well, let’s imagine you want to set up a relative location to .htpasswd file. As any decent surfer you type “Apache htpasswd relative location” into Google

“Yeah cool” - you think - “That is the solution of my problem!”. And, with a joyful cry, you click that, but what you see is

Those greedy capitalists don’t want to help you for free! If you are already charging your rifle, put it away - there is a better solution. Go back to the Google page you found the link on and look for the “Cached” button.

Click it! What you are going to see is a page, forum script has shown to the Googlebot. Scroll down… here you are!

That’s all. Now you see every single solution hidden by a “Buy subscription” link. You can be proud of yourself - you now have saved at least $12.95 per month.

Theory

Now let’s see the mechanics of what has happened. You have noticed that Google has shown that thread as the #1 result. Isn’t that strange? All you could see was a page with a question and 10 answers, but all hidden. It would be logical to assume that page is going to rank high for “All comments and solutions are available to Premium Service Members only.” query, since it is useless for you and gives no on-topic information about your question. Well, what really going on?

When the Googlebot enters that page, the forum software shows him the useful info and all the answers the experts have given. Googlebot thinks that the thread is valuable for a usual surfer (since bot thinks that it sees the same user is going to see on that page) and ranks that page high. Next, when the surfer goes to that page via Google, the forum script recognizes him as not bot and offers to buy a subscription. Remember what it is called? Right, cloaking! Cloaking - showing one page to the bot and another to the surfer.

They do that because of the dilemma: if they show the real page to the Googlebot, the page won’t rank and won’t get hardly any traffic - which means no money, on the other hand, if they show the real page to the surfer, there won’t be anything to be paid for - which is no money. So the solution seems to be cloaking the page. Actually it violates SE’s laws and I don’t know why Google hasn’t filtered such results yet. Anyways you are now aware how to beat those cheaters

Legality issue

So, is the above legal? The answer is, absolutely yes! Remember what you do - simplified, you go to Google and see it’s cache. You don’t even have to visit that forum! Viewing Google Cache is 100% legal so don’t hesitate to use this technique.

PS

An interesting idea is to mask your browser like it is Googlebot - all you need to do is to change your User-Agent - this will enable you to skip Google page and browse those forums like you’re paid user. There is a bunch of plugins for Firefox, so that will be easy.