Hacker News Reader

Comment by neovialogistics | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a third cause: the low visibility of high quality non-Reddit forums on Google against the tide of low-quality results.

There's some kind of SEO exploit that Google is unable to counter. Apparently, by creating bot accounts on a semi-reputable social media platform like LiveJournal, Baidu or Reddit and having them post endless links to each other from website X, website X is inflated on Google even if no humans interact with any of the bot posts/accounts.

I don't work in SEO and have never bothered to investigate this, it's purely a topic that keeps coming up in the twitter posts of one of the owners of Livejournal-spinoff Dreamwidth (their account is @Rahaeli).

View on HN

Google loves to group results by domain too. Say you search for something related to your hobby. Somewhere on the page is going to be a hit from the forum for that hobby, but just below it in a smaller font will be like a half dozen sub hits from that same domain, then that's all there is for that domain in the search results. Never mind that all the relevant knowledge online on this something might be contained in that forum, effectively below the fold until you expose it with the the site:forum.com flag, but this requires a priori knowledge of forum.com being a good source to use for your something.

Doesn’t it depend on the domain authority of the back links?

Sites like Reddit are no follow so I don’t understand why a bot reposting links there would bolster its ranking

Google has been more squishy on nofollow in the last few years:

https://twitter.com/g33konaut/status/1225704499660107776

So Google does follow nofollow links. In this tweet you can see they won't go as far as definitely saying there is no impact on page rank.

https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1532037901403336704

My theory is that google ignores nofollow at its own discretion.

I don't think I've ever seen a result linking to Baidu or LiveJournal, and Reddit is always legitimate content. Might be a location thing?

That's not what I'm saying.

* Make posts linking to X on platform of choice.

* Google starts linking to X (not the posts about X).

Reddit has tons of spam that I run into whenever I try to search for any kind of prior product information or advice through the API. As of June 30th, maybe that will no longer be my problem, but I don’t think the spam links will cease.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com