Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.
Some examples:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-single-...
The comment to justify why the question is closed is always the same: "This question appears to be off-topic because it is about SEO".
FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo
I do not follow you.
> FWIW, legit SEO questions do have a home on SE: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo
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.
234 questions tagged http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/seo+ajax?sort=newe...
74 questions tagged http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/seo+aja...
"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.
[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
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.
The knowledge would certainly be useful to many people, but it is outside of SO's scope as it is defined.
[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...
(edit: typo)
I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question:
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/79363/why-was-the-r...
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.
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.
1. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181342/r-vs-p... [closed as off topic]
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.
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.
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.
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.