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Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.

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I've found that Google is willing to return one or two Reddit links but then reverts to its usual SEO crapspam for the rest of the results. Even "site:reddit.com" only returns only a fraction of the discussions related to the topic. The site's been around for over a decade, and most topics have been discussed dozens of times or more.

I would think they apply their normal algorithms.

If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.

Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...

The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.

Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam sites would just link a lot to their content spam on reddit.

Like giving Reddit a higher “page score” than other websites?

No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do it well.

It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been seeing more news organizations directly linking to reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit results a few years ago. You used to never see them in search results, but now they have started showing up.

Gotcha. Google search ranking threads versus Reddit search ranking threads.

I’d posit that Google counts the upvotes and other signals on the thread to calculate EAT or whatever.

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