Hacker News was penalized by recent Google Panda update (11th April). | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News was penalized by recent Google Panda update (11th April).

alexa.com

10 pointsZakuzaa10 comments

No, it wasn't. When I saw this headline I went and checked on news.ycombinator.com, and it wasn't affected. In fact, Hacker News actually got more Google traffic on Monday, 5/23 compared with Monday, 4/11.

Wow, thanks.

I submitted because Alexa is fairly accurate with very high traffic sites, and the drop in HN's rank and reach seemed to coincide with Google Panda roll out.

No worries, happy to clarify.

not questioning your statement, but traffic from two arbitrary days doesn't prove much :)

Okay redduck666, I summed the most recent week of traffic sent to combinator.com from Google that I had data for, and then I summed a week of traffic sent to combinator.com from Google including 4/11 (while keeping the days aligned). Google sent over 20% more traffic in the most recent week when compared to the week of 4/11. I hope that the longer baseline + the fact that traffic increased--not decreased--is enough to convince you? :)

GOOD. HN's placement on Google search results is extremely disconcerting to me. I'm trying to have a conversation with HN people, not the whole Internet.

I don't see a drop in traffic in those stats - am I looking in the wrong place?

Edit: I think I found it, in mid-April there's a spike downward. But it recovers quickly, and it's not the biggest - change the view to 6 months or max and you can see some crazy changes at times.

Why is this a problem? How many of you actually stumbled onto Hacker News via a google search? People put way too much emphasis on their listing on Google. If you're selling doodads, then I guess that's important, but otherwise word of mouth is your overwhelming winner. In fact, I would say that goes for almost every site I visit regularly.

I use Google to find tidbits of information. One-off questions. I can't think of a single site that I have ever discovered via google that is something I visit regularly.

Don't trust Alexa, please...

Many great content sites were hit by Panda. I would take ehow in the results over most of the garbage Google indirectly promoted when the made algorithm changes.

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