Ask HN: How does Hacker News keep up with its SEO ranking? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does Hacker News keep up with its SEO ranking?

3 pointspalashkulsh5 comments

Hacker news or news.ycombinator.com consists purely of links to other articles from the web (other than show HN and Ask HN [like this one]). It doesn't adheres to nofollow from search engine company. Then how does it still rank up first, is it just popularity or is there any secret ingredient to its secret seo sauce.

Noob question it is but still better to ask. and what better place to ask than on it.

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The submissions have the nofollow atribute until the get enough points. Also, most of the spam is just autokilled.

"The submissions have the nofollow atribute until the get enough points."

I get the how and why of that for HN but not why search engines would pay attention to it.

I do know they pay attention though. Links to pages on my websites that I've submitted here get crawled almost instantly.

Nofollow was a reaction to sites that allowed spam but didn't manage or clean them, and the early SEO game of trying to get links on any and every high page rank site - and buying/selling high PR domains. It allowed a link without giving any pagerank love to it.

Setting nofollow until a link has enough votes, on a site that manages spam well, seems like an ideal way of handling it. No point using HN to boost your 5 page adsense sites (when those were still a major thing).

Shouldn't affect crawling though. Crawlers crawl sites that update often more frequently, and did IIRC long before nofollow. So HN and popular news sites like NYT, BBC, Guardian etc are probably being crawled near constantly. A new (followed) link should show up frighteningly quickly.

(This is all assuming Google haven't remade nofollow to mean something different now pagerank doesn't really count for much any more.)

that are some new insights, so popularity is the key ingredient.

Thank you! That makes perfect sense.

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