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Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is

Everyone seems to be focusing on the .gov site but if you take a look at the Stack Overflow home page, the page that would normally get indexed highly, there is very little telling Google what it is. There is no <meta name="description"> tag in the header. The H1 tag, important to Google, says "Top Questions". The content of the first page constantly changes. Plus, I would bet that most of the links into Stack Overflow are to individual articles, not the home page. Any particular article probably doesn't outrank a popular .gov site. This is just very poor SEO on Stack Overflow's part.

stormbrew 14y ago
I disagree it's necessarily poor SEO. They should do everything they can to ensure that pages that answer questions have better pageranks than their largely useless homepage. That's what gives the name stackoverflow power, questions actually getting answered.
- geargrinder 14y ago
  Certainly the individual questions and answers should rank highly. They do a somewhat better job at SEO on those pages, although there still is no meta description tag, leaving Google to guess what to put on the search results page. They could do a lot better on those pages too. The real content is buried below lots of javascript and other code. The higher on the page your real content is, the better. They do have pretty good titles and H1 tags on those pages, and the urls are okay, although I would move the name of the article up at least a level. Here is one: /questions/15181744/twitter-number-of-tweets-not-updating-testing-on-local But the original topic here was a search for "stack overflow" and for that search there could be no better page than the Home page (well, maybe the About page, although if they did their job better they would get one of those results with lots of sub-section links). There was no real attempt to optimize that page for search engines. Optimizing it for the keyword "stack overflow" isn't going to hurt the rank of those question/answer pages.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Too good, even. Google has a bad habit of ranking a question page lower (for matching keywords) than some random other (more popular) question page that links to the relevant question page.
rschmitty 14y ago
Not sure I disagree with SEO on "Stack Overflow" who is googling for that term? Practically any technical question I've searched for has resulted in a stack overflow (or super user) #1 result. I'd say they are doing a pretty good job, even if they don't do all the old school SEO stuff
- geargrinder 14y ago
  According to the Google Adwords tool, "stack overflow" is googled 74,000 times each month. Not to mention all the permutations. If I worked for Stack Overflow, I would also try to optimize for more general terms. The questions and answers are good at getting those long-tail keywords, but not so good at the more generic ones like "coding help" or "javascript help" or a hundred others. Stack Overflow isn't on the first page for either of those examples, or many others.
- walshemj 14y ago
  Brand Searches drive a lot of traffic to major sites people are lazy and use Google instead of bookmarks

stormbrew 14y ago

I disagree it's necessarily poor SEO. They should do everything they can to ensure that pages that answer questions have better pageranks than their largely useless homepage. That's what gives the name stackoverflow power, questions actually getting answered.

geargrinder 14y ago
Certainly the individual questions and answers should rank highly. They do a somewhat better job at SEO on those pages, although there still is no meta description tag, leaving Google to guess what to put on the search results page. They could do a lot better on those pages too. The real content is buried below lots of javascript and other code. The higher on the page your real content is, the better. They do have pretty good titles and H1 tags on those pages, and the urls are okay, although I would move the name of the article up at least a level. Here is one: /questions/15181744/twitter-number-of-tweets-not-updating-testing-on-local But the original topic here was a search for "stack overflow" and for that search there could be no better page than the Home page (well, maybe the About page, although if they did their job better they would get one of those results with lots of sub-section links). There was no real attempt to optimize that page for search engines. Optimizing it for the keyword "stack overflow" isn't going to hurt the rank of those question/answer pages.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Too good, even. Google has a bad habit of ranking a question page lower (for matching keywords) than some random other (more popular) question page that links to the relevant question page.

rschmitty 14y ago

Not sure I disagree with SEO on "Stack Overflow" who is googling for that term? Practically any technical question I've searched for has resulted in a stack overflow (or super user) #1 result. I'd say they are doing a pretty good job, even if they don't do all the old school SEO stuff

geargrinder 14y ago
According to the Google Adwords tool, "stack overflow" is googled 74,000 times each month. Not to mention all the permutations. If I worked for Stack Overflow, I would also try to optimize for more general terms. The questions and answers are good at getting those long-tail keywords, but not so good at the more generic ones like "coding help" or "javascript help" or a hundred others. Stack Overflow isn't on the first page for either of those examples, or many others.
walshemj 14y ago
Brand Searches drive a lot of traffic to major sites people are lazy and use Google instead of bookmarks