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Comment by lancefisher | Hacker News Reader

Looks like it's a cut/paste error. If you do wget www.doioig.gov, this is the page you get. Notice the meta refresh that points to stackoverflow.com.

  <!DOCTYPE HTML>
  <html lang="en-US">
  <head>
      <meta charset="UTF-8">
      <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1;url=http://stackoverflow.com">
      <script language="javascript">
          window.location.href = "http://www.doi.gov/oig/index.cfm"
      </script>
      <title>Page Redirection</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  If you are not redirected automatically, please click the link to continue to the <a href='http://www.doi.gov/oig/index.cfm'>U.S. Department of the Interior Office of Inspector General.</a>
  </body>
  </html>

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And here's why: http://stackoverflow.com/a/5411601/620239. Forgot to change that first occurrence after pasting it in. "Oh, it works. I'm done."

That's brilliant, surprised that Google managed to rank them so highly because of it though!

.gov domains have a ton of link juice.

Another good reason why you should always use "example.com".

I'm surprised http://example.com is reserved by IANA.

...why is that surprising?

Because it makes sense. These sorts of things normal are allowed to go through so that horrible unintended consequences can be wrought on the unsuspecting.

It's reserved per RFC 2606: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606

I edited the answer so it says example.com now.

Unless, you know, you want to be in the #1 spot on a Google search.

It has been edited.

Here are the past revisions: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/5411601/revisions

I'm actually glad it's been edited. There's an RFC for this, people!!

I bet there's some sort of logic on google's side that states, if a government homepage url redirects to another non .gov URL, that the .gov address should be the canonical page of the site thats being redirected too. Which would explain why stackoveflow's homepage isn't listed in the results. Just a guess.

I could imagine the ranking favours .gov domains, which should be reliable. But surely for anything Google sees as a redirect, the redirect target should be the canonical URL?

>But surely for anything Google sees as a redirect, the redirect target should be the canonical URL?

That would only be the case for a 301 redirect.

Why would this rank them so high though? Does the googlebot actually follow the http-equiv="refresh". If so, would changing http://stackoverflow.com to say http://dell.com make them rank #1 for searching for dell as well?

That sounds too easy. Also, if doioig.gov redirects to stackoverflow.com that just makes doioig.gov an alias for Stack Overflow. An alias shouldn't rank higher than the real thing.

There is no rational reason. I said as much and got downvoted by someone.

Glad to know someone who works for the government at least knows where to get their information.

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