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I assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way. I think Google cares more about the user expe

I assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way. I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.

interstitial 13y ago
He most certainly means Quora, which because of it's dark patterns I refuse to visit even when it ranks. Stack Exchange on the other hand, has another google problem. Many of the top results are "closed as blah blah blah" -- so you arrive from google to a Stack Exchange page which has your exact question, excitedly you click, only to find it closed and unanswered.
- grimtrigger 13y ago
  Just a heads up, you can search directly on SO and limit your results to answered questions.
- tempestn 13y ago
  Could SE improve that by generating a sitemap that de-emphasizes closed questions? IIRC Google gives the option to control the relative weighting of various pages without deindexing them entirely. (Although maybe a sitemap on the scale of SO would be problematic in some way? I've certainly never tried to create one that large.)
  - adventured 13y ago
    There's no size problem. Each sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 urls. Google's cache on SO's sitemap.xml file shows 126 files (maxing at 6.3 million urls (50k * 126); their site claims 6.33 million questions at the moment, so it all appears to roughly add up). I've run sites with millions of urls spread across a lot of sitemaps, and Google will devour them without any fundamental problems. I found it wasn't uncommon for Google to regularly screwup the indexing of a few sitemap files out of a hundred or whatever, and often it would randomly fail to update a % of sitemaps in a timely fashion.
- phazmatis 13y ago
  Just add -"stackoverflow" and all your problems will go away.
- codinghorror 13y ago
  Yeah closed and unanswered should definitely be delisted. These kinds of questions usually have negative votes so they do have a lower score in the sitemap weight but I am not sure how much emphasis G gives that. I will forward this on for SE to think about improving.
  - zaroth 13y ago
    I think it's a more basic problem. You find exactly the question you have, but SO decided the question was 'wrong' somehow. The question may not be answerable, but it doesn't make the question wrong. The question is nothing more than an expression of the users query or intent. For example, unanswerable questions could give a stack listing if relevant answerable questions. But it just seems wrong to take highly targeted inbound traffic and send them to a page which basically says 'nothing to see here'.
  - twic 13y ago
    > These kinds of questions usually have negative votes Or, quite often, substantial positive votes, and the wails of a legion of users protesting the closing. I would guess that that kind of question is more likely to be the target of enough inbound links to lift it into the search results people actually see. Marking closed, zero- or negative-voted questions as noindex might be a good move, though.
slig 13y ago
I most certainly didn't mean SO. I have nothing but <3 for your work.

interstitial 13y ago

He most certainly means Quora, which because of it's dark patterns I refuse to visit even when it ranks. Stack Exchange on the other hand, has another google problem. Many of the top results are "closed as blah blah blah" -- so you arrive from google to a Stack Exchange page which has your exact question, excitedly you click, only to find it closed and unanswered.

grimtrigger 13y ago
Just a heads up, you can search directly on SO and limit your results to answered questions.
tempestn 13y ago
Could SE improve that by generating a sitemap that de-emphasizes closed questions? IIRC Google gives the option to control the relative weighting of various pages without deindexing them entirely. (Although maybe a sitemap on the scale of SO would be problematic in some way? I've certainly never tried to create one that large.)
- adventured 13y ago
  There's no size problem. Each sitemap file can contain up to 50,000 urls. Google's cache on SO's sitemap.xml file shows 126 files (maxing at 6.3 million urls (50k * 126); their site claims 6.33 million questions at the moment, so it all appears to roughly add up). I've run sites with millions of urls spread across a lot of sitemaps, and Google will devour them without any fundamental problems. I found it wasn't uncommon for Google to regularly screwup the indexing of a few sitemap files out of a hundred or whatever, and often it would randomly fail to update a % of sitemaps in a timely fashion.
phazmatis 13y ago
Just add -"stackoverflow" and all your problems will go away.
codinghorror 13y ago
Yeah closed and unanswered should definitely be delisted. These kinds of questions usually have negative votes so they do have a lower score in the sitemap weight but I am not sure how much emphasis G gives that. I will forward this on for SE to think about improving.
- zaroth 13y ago
  I think it's a more basic problem. You find exactly the question you have, but SO decided the question was 'wrong' somehow. The question may not be answerable, but it doesn't make the question wrong. The question is nothing more than an expression of the users query or intent. For example, unanswerable questions could give a stack listing if relevant answerable questions. But it just seems wrong to take highly targeted inbound traffic and send them to a page which basically says 'nothing to see here'.
- twic 13y ago
  > These kinds of questions usually have negative votes Or, quite often, substantial positive votes, and the wails of a legion of users protesting the closing. I would guess that that kind of question is more likely to be the target of enough inbound links to lift it into the search results people actually see. Marking closed, zero- or negative-voted questions as noindex might be a good move, though.

slig 13y ago

I most certainly didn't mean SO. I have nothing but <3 for your work.