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It's to avoid people to post links in comments and benefit from HN's popularity to increase their rank in the search engines results. By specifying rel=nofollow
by Charlesmigli 14y ago
It's to avoid people to post links in comments and benefit from HN's popularity to increase their rank in the search engines results. By specifying rel=nofollow HN indicates the crawlers from Google not to count this hyperlink as a reference in their ranking algorithm.
This is a common practice that you can see on other popular forums.
- jqueryin 14y agoJust as an aside, I think he's specifically referring to that particular instance on the front page as opposed to some of the newer posts. New posts seem to have rel="nofollow", but it doesn't explain why that particular job posting has rel="nofollow". Perhaps it's a combination of being a new post but auto front-paged due to it being a YC alum job?
- acard 14y agoYes, that's exactly what I was referring to, I have seen them all as nofollow on the latest new section, however on the front page only that one is nofollow even though all of them are external links. But as you just said maybe is because it is a YC job post.
- acard 14y agoAlthough this is also a no follow as well http://www.slideshare.net/charlesmiglietti/read-smarter-not-harder http://www.slideshare.net/charlesmiglietti/read-smarter-not-...