4 ms·

This is true - when I post articles on HN I usually get between 5 and 30 click throughs, and it also does wonders for the speed of Google indexing. Having said

This is true - when I post articles on HN I usually get between 5 and 30 click throughs, and it also does wonders for the speed of Google indexing. Having said that, I ensure submitted articles remain relevant and of interest to the community. We're releasing three new articles this week - I'll certainly put one up here, but the other two are less relevant. They might garner traffic to my site, but I don't want noise on HN so why create it myself?

sosuke 17y ago
Absolutely true about posting only relevant articles. I try to keep even my comments to myself unless they actually add to the discussion in some way here on HN. Each post I made recently I felt was actually relevant, I wouldn't post anything I didn't think was interesting.
jacquesm 17y ago
The google indexing is absolutely true. I've tried to time it, usually it takes only about 45 minutes from the moment it gets posted to being indexed. You can see how long it took by searching in google for the hn submission and then check to see how long ago it was spidered, versus how long ago it was posted. The google bot must re-visit hn very frequently, 10's of times per day for the 'news' and 'newest' page.
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  And I guess there's always google juice to consider - may be more relevant to pages about Hackers, but if it's being indexed that often than all the sites HN links to must benefit from association. (I think this comment really shows my SEO naivety, but I hope you get the gist.)
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    I think the HN homepage pagerank is diluted too much to make much of a difference, first of all there are 30 other outgoing links, and besides that they change all the time. Google 'juice' is most likely best collected by having links on authoritative pages that will keep the link visible on the same page for a long time, and that have relatively few outgoing links.
- _delirium 17y ago
  The 'newest' page links all have rel=nofollow on them, though. Does it still index the targets despite that?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Good one. I don't know the exact implications of nofollow, but I think it might be that if google considers the destination to be legit that it will add the url to its crawl queue without giving it any 'pagerank juice'. Only a googler could tell you for sure though. I've seen google ferret out results that were never linked through the toolbar or some other mechanism outside of the regular crawl process. (in that one case the toolbar was my only possible explanation, or it was through analytics).

sosuke 17y ago

Absolutely true about posting only relevant articles. I try to keep even my comments to myself unless they actually add to the discussion in some way here on HN. Each post I made recently I felt was actually relevant, I wouldn't post anything I didn't think was interesting.

jacquesm 17y ago

The google indexing is absolutely true. I've tried to time it, usually it takes only about 45 minutes from the moment it gets posted to being indexed. You can see how long it took by searching in google for the hn submission and then check to see how long ago it was spidered, versus how long ago it was posted. The google bot must re-visit hn very frequently, 10's of times per day for the 'news' and 'newest' page.

JacobAldridge 17y ago
And I guess there's always google juice to consider - may be more relevant to pages about Hackers, but if it's being indexed that often than all the sites HN links to must benefit from association. (I think this comment really shows my SEO naivety, but I hope you get the gist.)
- jacquesm 17y ago
  I think the HN homepage pagerank is diluted too much to make much of a difference, first of all there are 30 other outgoing links, and besides that they change all the time. Google 'juice' is most likely best collected by having links on authoritative pages that will keep the link visible on the same page for a long time, and that have relatively few outgoing links.
_delirium 17y ago
The 'newest' page links all have rel=nofollow on them, though. Does it still index the targets despite that?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Good one. I don't know the exact implications of nofollow, but I think it might be that if google considers the destination to be legit that it will add the url to its crawl queue without giving it any 'pagerank juice'. Only a googler could tell you for sure though. I've seen google ferret out results that were never linked through the toolbar or some other mechanism outside of the regular crawl process. (in that one case the toolbar was my only possible explanation, or it was through analytics).