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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I hear this a lot, but I'd love to see an example (especially including the sites that should rank).

This may or may not be what you're looking for, but my freelance site just can't hit the front page in my industry when dozens of highly funded agencies can dominate it. I've published a 50k word industry-specific book on my site, have SEO'd as much as possible and have an older domain than those better funded. Won't link to it here, but it seems to be a real issue to me.

If a search engine let you differentiate and sort between content match vs pagerank match vs Adwords spend we might be able to mitigate the issue somewhat.

btw, your site's redirect to the HTTPS version doesn't seem to work correctly in Firefox, Safari, or IE. After reading your comment, I was curious to learn more. When I typed in just your domain name plus CMD+ENTER (which adds "www." and ".com" to the address bar text in Firefox), I got a 404 page, not the 301 redirect to the HTTPS site. When I add "http://", the redirect seems to work.

Thanks for letting me know, and for the more detailed info - the redirect worked for the basic permutations I tested for (www.domain.com, and http://domain.com etc.) but I am redirecting non-www and www traffic to https://www. in Nginx. (Solution found, see edit below.)

I'd not heard of the CMD+ENTER method before, so thanks for the heads up. Still not entirely sure what Firefox is submitting in that case. Will test.

I wasn't referring to this site in the parent comment, but to my freelance site. I'll put that site in my profile for 24 hours just in case anyone wants to take a look.

EDIT: Fixed, as noted in reply to nl's comments. A recent change led to a redirect line being mistakenly commented out.

This.

I don't work in this area, but I'd say that 99% of the time I hear someone complaining about how Google is favoring sites that pay for advertising over them I find that they are making these incredibly basic errors.

For me, http://www.linguaquote.com/ gives a 404. It's only when I go to https://www.linguaquote.com/ that it works.

That's all well and good, and thanks for checking, but I wasn't referring to that site in the parent comment. The other site does have SSL enabled, but only recently and via Let's Encrypt. The issue is much longer standing than this.

So I'm afraid it's not quite as simple as you make out in this case.

In other news, I've just pinpointed the missing line in the recently changed nginx config for Linguaquote; the http://www block had it's redirect commented out. Still, for this site in particular Google Webmaster tools is set up for the https version where no errors have been reported and SSL Labs gave an A+ for the stapling, PFS, heartbleed etc. etc. efforts I went to. I don't think this redirect was having an adverse effect on ranking, but I don't expect this site to hit the front page just yet - much more content to add before aiming for that.

Is it bad form to quote myself?

I'd love to see an example (especially including the sites that should rank).

I put the link to the freelance site in my profile, which I only mentioned in my reply to cpeterso above - apologies for not making it clearer.

Will leave it there a bit longer in case you do come back to this thread as still genuinely interested in your opinion on the matter.

One example I've experienced is searching for iphone jailbreak related stuff. Perhaps that's to be expected.

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