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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

This is most likely the same reason digg's frontpage was deindexed. There's no "content" per se, it's just links. Someone will notice, add an exception, and all is well.

Unlike Digg, HN has a substantial amount of content in the comments pages though, which are heavily indexed.

Edit - All the comment pages are still indexed just fine. It's /only/ the front-page. Which, imo, doesn't really matter anyway.

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That wasn't the reason for Digg's issue at all: Google had tried to manually deindex some pages from the site, but made a mistake and pulled the whole domain. They reincluded it shortly after.

The comments are the real content of this site.

Sounds like overaggressive spam detection.

This sounds like the case. Google is getting aggressive with its Panda updates, and as a previous commenter noted, the HN homepage is just links. Since that triggers Panda, it's a good bet that Google went a little overboard (not unprecedented).

> the HN homepage is just links. Since that triggers Panda

To be more specific, Panda is triggered by low quality/duplicate content. 'Penguin' is triggered by spammy/bad backlinks.

I'm not saying you're wrong (a page of links would look pretty low quality to google's algo), I just wanted to add on for clarity's sake.

Yes, I see where I was unclear. It's not the links themselves, but the lack of original, robust content.

The Panda update definitely pushed lazy/low-quality pages down the SERPs, but doesn't tend to deindex pages.

Also: while the page doesn't have any of its own unique content, it presumably still has high engagement and low bounce rate.

That's a good point. Hadn't thought the issue through that far.

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