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Comment by thushan | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have any ideas why the clone sites like efreedom are ranking above Stack Overflow when SO's inbound links and reputation values are likely far better than efreedom's in Google's algorithm? I'm surprised that search engine optimization could do THAT much to a site's ranking. Also it's not like SO isn't doing the same kind of SEO themselves.

What I'm trying to get at is, with all things equal, let's say Stack Overflow and efreedom's SEO is on par with each other, shouldn't SO's reputation/inbound link ranks automatically trump things?

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My understanding is that the clones take the material and modify it to have exact matches for phrases that people are likely to search for. The exact match causes it to rank higher for those searches.

SO is not editing the material for SEO, they just have whatever content the users generated.

Efreedom is deliberately manufacturing links, whereas SO may be just hoping for the best.

Efreedom has been the bane of my recent programming related searches, polluting my results to no end.

Do what I've taken to doing nowdays, for programming questions go straight to stackoverflow.com before Google. Or use google with site:stackoverflow.com

Or just don't use google anymore. I've switched to Duckduckgo and Blekko. So far, so good.

Or use stacksearch.org (to include serverfault et al.), or the custom search built into stackexchange (which uses Google behind the scenes as well).

stackoverflow has been my first port of call for programming queries for quite some time. If Google wasn't so filled with scraper junk that probably wouldn't be the case.

Just use this chrome extension, it redirects them all to the relevant SO page.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gledhololmniapej...

Shouldn't the sites hosting deliberately manufacturing links also fall to the algorithm's reputation/inbound link values as well. We all know they don't, and that seems like that is one of the fundamental issues here. As much as I'd like to have a site black list, that doesn't really help the major issue at hand.

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