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Comment by mightytightywty | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't news.ycombinator.com redirect to hackernews.com instead?

We'd need a compelling reason to do a major surgery like that. It's possible to imagine scenarios, so it's great to have the option, but I think it would be a mistake to exercise it just-because. I say that for at least two reasons: (1) users hate change; and (2) the feedback loops between HN and YC are vital to both, so it would be bad to weaken them.

If I might suggest a major: (3) breaks SEO for potentially a very long time causing HN to fall out of search results to common queries on the major search engines. (I'm aware of site move tools and 301's, but we almost always see some decline on a domain switchover that takes time to recover)

Great point!

Would that really be such a bad thing? I don’t imagine HN sees much traffic from search.

I can see a world where drawing people in from search could be a bad thing. But I know I’ve found many things at Reddit and Stackoverflow (for example) by searching, when I very rarely frequent those sites (only ever visit from search results).

So I could imagine others similarly would find content here valuable via search queries.

Now that you mention it, I hardly ever see HN results on Google. Not that I would necessarily expect to — or maybe I’ve just learned to not expect them to.

But there is quality content here that doesn’t seem to show up in search the way Reddit and Stackoverflow content often show up in search.

Have dang/others looked into SEO? Or maybe it’s explicitly not a priority?

To what end? Accelerating towards Eternal September?

I've actually been surprised how quickly HN is indexed. When I see comments about a seemingly niche thing, I often google for more details - and often enough the comment that made me google it is among the top results.

Odd. I get HN results. You're right that it's not as frequent as SO or Reddit, but it seems to surpass the "hardly ever" threshold.

> I hardly ever see HN results on Google.

Got to DuckDuck #1 with this string: "propulsive thrombosis survivable flotation counterexample" (Interesting picture collection)

Kept making NASA #1 until I threw thrombosis in. Got slow though :)

Generally SEO should work fine if the migration is managed well (on Google at least). Google has a tool to verify ownership on both sites and notify them of the move explicitly.

That's really interesting, that you take advantage of symbiosis between the YC and HN functions. Have you ever published or written about the relationships and benefits to each? I'd be fascinated to read more. I'm sure some of it is completely obvious and some much less so. Curious to hear what would surprise me.

I don't know if this counts, but I did write https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285793 a while back.

Please don't change it, I like it as it is; 'ycombinator' is a cool word.

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Explain me this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28055839

HN is an YC platform where YC companies and founders have special perks by design. It is nice to have it on ycombinator.com subdomain for clarity.

Biggest problem with this would be broken password managers.

Wouldn't be a problem if auth is still handled on ycombinator.com

That introduces a problem where certain browsers ask the user to confirm the cross-domain interaction before proceeding (which I suppose mitigates various silent credentials theft and tracking problems) unless you do whole-page SSO, in which case you end up with cookie, anti-tracking, and container-routing problems.

What browser prompts for permission to follow a redirect? OAuth flows don't require cross-domain interaction in any of the ways that browsers have fought to reduce.

Redirects are fine as long as no container-type things are in play (since those don't necessarily carry the origin's cookies across the boundary), it's embedded cross-domain auth forms in an iframe that can cause a dialog.

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