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I wish you would reconsider the decision or at least adjust as I suggest below.

Having private Q&A is much different in my mind than public Q&A.

The logic/argument that making it all public helps everyone misses the point of private Q&A entirely.  Those that choose to use private Q&A do so precisely because they do not want their questions public.  Why is that?  For me, there is almost always specific mention of URLs in my questions.  Not only do we not want to raise red flags and reveal issues for potential COMPETITORS to find, we often do not want CLIENTS to be aware of the conversation as we work to resolve issues or make changes to improve performance.

The other reason I like the Private Q&A is that the quality of private answers is simply higher and more reliable in our experience.  Having a fallback resource has been a great comfort when we step out of our areas of expertise.  Losing that is a negative, no doubt.

ONE WAY TO LESSEN THE EXPOSURE OF A QUESTION THAT NOW MUST BE PUBLIC (but that we do not wish to be public) would be to add in an optional check box that disallows indexation by the search engines.  That way, it at least makes it harder for those outside seomoz.org to discover the conversation.

Thanks Keri.  I think you're half way there in what you suggest.   There is a distinction between a good answer and a question/answer the submitter would want others outside of mozzers to find.  You can have one or the other or both.

What I am suggesting is that you simply allow the person asking the question to decide if it should be found by the search engines.

If we are talking about issues specific to an industry, brand, website or specific URL we often may not want that discussion to appear on the radar of people tracking the same.  I am sure I am not alone in this.

Site visitors at seomoz.org would still be able to search for, read all Q&A etc. but by giving the OP a choice to disallow indexation, you are removing the likelihood of those outside of this community finding a conversation(s) that may strongly prefer not be open to the world.

I like the quality assurance aspect also (good answer, endorsed by staffer), but serves a different purpose.  It would be not difficult to have both I think.  Include a checkbox that is checked by default that says "allow this post to be be indexed by the search engines" and you can still implement your Q/A process for what appears on seomoz in Q&A, but allow OP to decide on indexation.

SE