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Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

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Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#131

Post by Matt_Cutts »

AznHisoka wrote: post #108
apetresc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding? Matt is basically a superhero who helps anyone he can find. He's solved problems for people complaining on Twitter, on Google+, he hosts regular video office hours when anyone can come to him with problems, etc. It may be the first time YOU'VE seen him rush in to help someone, but this is Matt Cutts' standard MO.

No, he's not a super hero.. and no he doesn't help everyone that asks for it. I've brought up many issues over the years to him via Twitter, blog comments, emails, etc, and none of them.. count them.. ZERO have been addressed by him. He just gives preferential treatment to those sites that make a lot of noise, and might give Google or Google's quality team a lot of negative press. That's all he does. I've even brough…

Hi AznHisoka. A lot of people send me spam reports, and I'm happy to pass them on. But normally we investigate the spam reports without sending back specific feedback of what action we took in response.

P.S. Just curious--is this the same AznHisoka from BlackHat World, the "Blackhat SEO forum"? http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/members/137345-azn...

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#132

Post by Matt_Cutts »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #76
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can look back in your search history to find the specific searches that didn't do well for you, we're always happy to get really concrete examples. The best reports look like "I did a search for [Bavarian red widgets] and the results weren't good because e.g. you were missing a specific page X that you used to return or should return, or you returned Austrian red widgets" or whatever. Lots of Googlers are clea…

This is awesome. Matt friggin Cutts is over here personally responding to not just the big shots (as in PG, and I don't mean that in a bad way at all) but some of us little people too. I see this stuff and it just inspires me. I really hope one day I can be in a position where all types of people, rich, poor, powerful, powerless, can all benefit from my skill or knowledge and that I would be the guy who helps the ave…

Happy to help! I was just hitting up HN for some stories to pre-load into tabs for a plane ride and happened to see the story. Bugs happen on our side too, so I was interested to dig into this case.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#133

Post by Matt_Cutts »

pierrefar wrote: post #83
markerdmann wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's helpful, thanks. I haven't kept a record of those searches (they were mostly programming-related queries), but I'd be happy to submit reports in the future. Is there a URL or email address for this purpose?

At the bottom of every search results page is a link that says something like "give us feedback". That's your first point of call for reporting bad results, spam, etc. If you have a whole bunch queries that are somehow related, like say we do a bad job at Python function names, then you can collect them and post them on our forums in one go. And please give us details as Matt said. In particular, If your refer to a s…

What Pierre said. And if there's some specific programming-related search, feel free to tweet me a link to the bad search and why it was bad.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#134

Post by Matt_Cutts »

rumpelstiltskin wrote: post #94
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can look back in your search history to find the specific searches that didn't do well for you, we're always happy to get really concrete examples. The best reports look like "I did a search for [Bavarian red widgets] and the results weren't good because e.g. you were missing a specific page X that you used to return or should return, or you returned Austrian red widgets" or whatever. Lots of Googlers are clea…

Here's a search that tripped me up - I'm in Houston, TX. When I searched for 'windshield repair houston', the 1st result - wwwDOThoustonwindshieldrepairDOTnet - looked promising so I made an appointment with them to get my windshield repaired. When I went to their place of business, it was just a guy in a pickup truck in the parking lot of a strip mall, with a 'windshield repair' sign on the back of the truck. Turns…

We'll check into this--thanks for the detailed report.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#136

Post by rumpelstiltskin »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #134
rumpelstiltskin wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a search that tripped me up - I'm in Houston, TX. When I searched for 'windshield repair houston', the 1st result - wwwDOThoustonwindshieldrepairDOTnet - looked promising so I made an appointment with them to get my windshield repaired. When I went to their place of business, it was just a guy in a pickup truck in the parking lot of a strip mall, with a 'windshield repair' sign on the back of the truck. Turns…

We'll check into this--thanks for the detailed report.

You're welcome. I did a little more digging and wwwDOTpatscowindshieldrepairDOTcom is a mirror site with the same info that's ranking for the same terms, and the backlink profile for this site also shows lots of paid backlinks.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#137

Post by warmfuzzykitten »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #93
wmf wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG knows his shit. He knows how to block crawlers, he knows how get SEO done, he's no dummy. Apparently he doesn't use Google Webmaster Tools, though.

It seems he doesn't want to. From what I understand there's the possibility that he'd prefer to accomplish his goal without the use of Wemaster Tools. Like I said, he knows his shit, so he's going to do things on his terms if he can. Webmaster Tools might be what the average guy wants to use but then there are some who follow the beat of their own drummer whenever possible for whatever reasons we may never know.

This fiasco is not good evidence for pg knowing his shit. If he wants to block bots and he doesn't want to use the tools provided to make that work, maybe HN should be #10. It's even behind the wikipedia article describing it. Which is actually not bad for a dead site.

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#138

Post by wheels »

pg wrote: post #126
wheels wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered putting a caching reverse proxy in front of the arc app to keep the backend from having to render all of the old pages? It seems like the only dynamic element of old articles is the "$x days ago" bit and that'd be pretty easy to turn into something static by instead just putting in timestamps in the actual HTML and using Javascript to transform them into how many hours / days ago they were. Then t…

I believe Rtm has already set one up.

The conspicuous lack of a "Server:" header inclines me to believe that that's probably not the case (most web servers set one indicating the server software and version). Here are the headers that HN sends out from an old post (20 days ago):

  HTTP/1.1 200 OK
  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
  Cache-Control: private
  Connection: close
  Cache-Control: max-age=0

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#139

Post by MatthewPhillips »

adbge wrote: post #122
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I alluded to some of the ways that I've seen people shoot themselves in the foot in a blog post a few years ago: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/the-web-is-a-fuzz-test-patch-y... "You would not believe the sort of weird, random, ill-formed stuff that some people put up on the web: everything from tables nested to infinity and beyond, to web documents with a filetype of exe, to executables returned as text documents. In…

The number of webpages with HTML that's just plain wrong (and renders fine!) is staggering. I often wonder what the web would be like if web browsers threw an error upon encountering a syntax error rather than making a best effort to render. If you're writing HTML, you should be validating it: http://validator.w3.org/

Google.com has 39 errors and 2 warnings. Among other things, they don't close their body or html tags.

Is there any real downside to having syntax errors?

Re: Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'

#140

Post by orijing »

tonfa wrote: post #90
orijing wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were truly their goal, their ads would never be the useful, because if they were the best results, they would be duplicates of the organic search results (hence useless). Or, if they weren't the best results, then the best results are in the organic search. Clearly that's not the case, as advertising makes 99% of their revenues.

If you're looking to buy shoes, why should the organic results for [your favorite model] (likely wikipedia, the brand website, etc.) be better than ads?

That's exactly my point. I was responding to the parent's suggestion that "Google should simply deliver the best results, no matter what algorithm they use to do so." In the scenario you describe, the best results would be the stores (for example) where you would buy those shoes.

Remember, organic doesn't have to mean non-commercial. In fact, if I search for best buy, the first organic result is bestbuy.com

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