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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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 :)

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.

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.

Great point!

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