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Comment by lars | Hacker News Reader

This is a bad idea.

1) It's essentially spam, which Google works to prevent. It seems likely this will actually hurt Mozilla's rank in searches.

2) It's unnecessary. Google's results are usually fine. If you really want a page on Mozilla Dev Center you just add the letters "mdc" to your search, and it's the top result every time.

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Google's results are usually fine.

If I had to chose one single thing at which Google results suck, it would have to be Javascript documentation.

the point is you need to add mdc, people searching for javascript that do not know about mdc get sent to barely related sites at best, but more often misleading and wrong documentation

Oh my god... This is so awesome!

Call me stupid - but I am one of those persons who was unaware of MDC - and to be honest Mozilla sites hierarchy can be hard/impossible to traverse for the un-initiated.

I was wishing so much to find something like that JavaScript Guide. I love JS - but the little intricacies that are common knowledge to greybeards were so hard to find about - now I got it all here.

!!! Yay!

Mozilla sites hierarchy can be hard/impossible to traverse for the un-initiated

I wonder if they'll improve this.

Well, it's not for a lack of trying.

Agreed on 1). It's not unnecessary though. If you don't know what mdc is, you can't search for it. JavaScript is often said to be the most misunderstood programming language. I think this is because there is no definitive, easily findable resource on it.

lars: can you explain #1 a bit more? how is a simple widget/affiliate button spam?

just trying to understand this a bit better, because we are planning on doing an official mozilla mdn affiliate campaign to promote other parts of our documentation.

thanks! - jay, mdn product manager

As I understand it, the point of this is to manipulate how MDC ranks in google searches. A lot of people try to do this, and google works to prevent it. What I'm saying is that google's algorithms might see this sudden rise in links coming from sites with potentially widely different content, consider it unnatural, and classify it as spam. They also might not, I certainly don't know the details of their spam prevention algorithm.

I'm not saying that I personally am offended by this widget, I don't give a damn. But google might.

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