Ask HN: Why does HN have a relatively low Google PageRank? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why does HN have a relatively low Google PageRank?

2 pointsdanso4 comments

Don't know if this is the way it's always been, but HN's pagerank seems low given its relative popularity...At first I thought it was egregiously low, because https://news.ycombinator.com registers as a 3. But I see that the canonical link for the homepage (the first thing that comes up when you Google "Hacker News") is:

https://news.ycombinator.com/news

Which has a score of 5.

Interestingly enough, the submission link (https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) has a PageRank of 6.

I know HN doesn't rely on SEO and such, I just thought that popularity alone (and its threads are commonly linked to, especially by the OP's themselves) would give it a higher-than-5 PageRank.

(I'm retrieving PageRank by using one of the various external scripts/websites out there for this purpose, such as http://www.pagerank-checker.com/ or the Chrome extension)

Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches.

Ahh...my first guess was that every hyperlink was just nofollow, but I see HN discussion threads come up fairly frequently in Google searches (on technical topics)

If you really want to make it difficult for people to find this place, an idea might be to raise the technical threshold required to view it: serve it on telnet like a BBS-era board, or run it as a Tor hidden service, or better yet: both!

It might be a bad idea for some reason I cannot conceive of right now.

One thing is not want people wondering around, looking for a quick random answer, as this site is pretty much about community.

Other is make it difficult to access by a random, specific criteria, such as technical hability. Yes, I am no tech hacker, never used Tor, but I try to be part of this community as valuable member. I think community is about aligning interests, not an exclusivist club.

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