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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'

#71

Post by trickjarrett »

felipe wrote: post #58
unreal37 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not disturbing at all. I am glad Google is a company made up of humans and not uncaring robots. Human nature is that people want to help others when they are in a position to do so. I would do the same if HN needed my help. Of course, there are people who want to take advantage of people like Matt to give themselves an economic advantage, and I have no sympathy for those people if they can't get someone in Googl…

> I am glad Google is a company made up of humans and not uncaring robots That's exactly the problem. Google is notorious for providing horrible customer support, so why some people get personalized help, while the rest of us are stuck with the uncaring robots ?

Google does have bad customer service when they're working through the normal channels. But Google Employees are awesome. I got personal attention from core G+ devs when I broke my G+ profile.

The point is if you can build relationships with Google employees rather than with Google itself then you too can get this sort of amazing help.

There's nothing sinister or crazy about this. Rather than being one in a million, become one in a circle of friends or acquaintances.

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

#72

Post by storborg »

arctangent wrote: post #28
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a self-service tool in webmaster tools for people who prefer to be crawled slower.

Do you support/respect the "crawl-delay" directive? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Crawl...

Nope. As mentioned above, apparently Google thinks people will "shoot themselves in the foot" with the crawl-delay directive, while they won't with Google's special interface (which requires registering and logging in).

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

#73

Post by tripzilch »

1010101111001 wrote: post #46
hahla wrote: post #29

Does anyone else find it disturbing that google employees are bending over for pg/hn? Seriously, if any other webmaster blocked googles bots they wouldn't change their algorithms to accommodate, or see how they could use less of our resources. Its pg's fault not googles, and I dont see why they should care. Maybe from their standpoint it would be more beneficial to google users who are used to typing in 'hacker news'…

Was the query for a domain name or just hacker+news? How do we know? Does make any difference? I don't think of this site as "Hacker News". I think of it as ycombinator, and the subdomain, news. Should users of hackernews.com think of that site as something else, e.g. whatever is between the title tags? A searchable list of domain names, ranked by popularity. Or even a searchable list of main page titles. Is that how…

Unsure. On several occasions I got the distinct impression that a lot of members aren't actually interested in "hacking" (for any of its definitions), instead you get people asking about the value of jailbreaking a phone: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3169000

I suppose it is because the top hits below HN are perhaps even less about "hacker news" ?

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

#74

Post by billpatrianakos »

felipe wrote: post #58
unreal37 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not disturbing at all. I am glad Google is a company made up of humans and not uncaring robots. Human nature is that people want to help others when they are in a position to do so. I would do the same if HN needed my help. Of course, there are people who want to take advantage of people like Matt to give themselves an economic advantage, and I have no sympathy for those people if they can't get someone in Googl…

> I am glad Google is a company made up of humans and not uncaring robots That's exactly the problem. Google is notorious for providing horrible customer support, so why some people get personalized help, while the rest of us are stuck with the uncaring robots ?

I see your point and maybe my attitude toward it is totally biased or morally/ethically off balance but I think it's just fine.

PG knows his shit. He knows how to block crawlers, he knows how get SEO done, he's no dummy. "So what?" you say. Well I work in web development and I meet with people all the time and explain to them how to run a site and get rankings up, etc. I tell them I'll give them the tools, show them how to use them and even leave detailed manuals on how to work everything. These people are so into it at our first meeting and they're excited to get into it and work this stuff.

Then the job is done, the tools are handed over, and the lessons are learned. What do they do? Nothing. Then they do nothing. Then even more nothing. The site is never updated and they do no maintenance whatsoever and eventually it becomes outdated and dead for all intents and purposes. A year later they want to know why they're not ranking in Google. I ask if they've checked or even once used any of the tools I gave them and the answer is always no. Then they demand I fix it. I kindly remind them they're the ones who wanted to have Larry in accounting run the site because he's "good at computers" and to save money by not hiring an IT guy.

So the point I'm making is that I'm sure there are a ton of people out there who are trying to get customer service without trying to help themselves or using the resources readily available. I think it's great that Google is showing they're willing to help those who help themselves.

I think google isn't treating everyone equally but they are treating people fairly. There's a difference. I'd prefer fairness. Not all "customers" are created equal so you compensate by treating them with fairness instead.

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

#76

Post by billpatrianakos »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #24
markerdmann wrote: post #11

Has Google been making significant changes to the search ranking algorithms in the past couple months? I've noticed a significant decline in the quality of results, to the point that (for the first time in years), I've bounced over to DuckDuckGo or Bing to try my luck there. I love Google as a company, so (if this isn't just in my head) I'd love to see things get better again. EDIT: Looks like the change to HN's rank…

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 average Joe the same as the hot shot CEO. I hope I carry that with me as I build my own business. Thanks for being so cool, Matt Cutts.

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

#77

Post by eurohacker »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #9

I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly. Added: Looks like HN has been blocking Googlebot, so our automated systems started to think that HN was dead. I dropped an email to PG to ask what he'd like us to do.

can you improve my site also Matt and fix the issue , i had the same problem some time ago - some wordpress plugin blocked googlebot unintentinally and i lost the ranking,

i am sure here are many folks here as well who had similar problems, why not help us all out ))

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

#78

Post by jfoster »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #34
aw3c2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to set that crawl rate but do not see why I must register at Google to do so. Why can't Google support the Crawl-Delay directive in robots.txt for this?

My plane is about to take off, but very briefly: people sometimes shoot themselves in the foot and get it way, way wrong. Like "crawl a single page from my website every five years" wrong. Crawl-Delay is (in my opinion) not the best measure. We tend to talk about "hostload," which is the inverse: the number of simultaneous connections that are allowed.

Instead of completely disregarding Crawl-Delay, why not support it up to a maximum value that is deemed sensible? This would prevent people from completely shooting themselves in the foot, and it would surely be better than completely disregarding it.

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

#79

Post by Mamady »

metaprinter wrote: post #57
wgx wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we could all get our Google woes fixed in such a manner.

seriously. i can't get a hospital to show up in google maps... no human for me to talk to. HN is number 4 instead of 1 google page one, they're right on it.

Bad PR always seems to get instant action - it's more damage control than anything else.

If you have an audience, you have PR power.

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

#80

Post by StavrosK »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #53
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #9

I think I know what the problem is; we're detecting HN as a dead page. It's unclear whether this happened on the HN side or on Google's side, but I'm pinging the right people to ask whether we can get this fixed pretty quickly. Added: Looks like HN has been blocking Googlebot, so our automated systems started to think that HN was dead. I dropped an email to PG to ask what he'd like us to do.

Apparently the page in the top spot now hasn't been updated since: 2011.07.08 It now only consists of ads, a twitter feed, and a "Abba-da-dabba-da-dabba-dabba Dat’s all folks!" line. So what if Googlebot thought HN was dead? Why would it opt to show a "more dead" page in place of it? I think you're fibbing.

The other page isn't dead, they can access it.
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