Ah, that would makes sense. Happens to me all the time when I leave HN pages open for a while then try to use them later. I imagine the bots try to follow links they picked up earlier a long time later as well at times. Kind of funny a bad session system on a site can kill your search rankings, though. It would be fatal for sites that live off Google traffic, and tough for people using off the shelf software to deal with.
Btw this is showing the pages indexed for the site HN. That its not showing in the results now for your brand WILL have devastating results on your traffic directly from Google. Though you might not care?
His Hacker News query give me https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs back as first result. Just for fun I tried the same query on DDG and the 27th result was the first ycombinator domain I got back.
This is arguably the best result for the query, since it explains what HN is about and provides a link to the front page. (People who have already used HN know where it is and don't need to search for it.)
I block cookies from Google, so they're not relying on my search history to give me relevant results.
And I'm not sure why searching for "HN" would be reasonably expected to get someone to Hacker News. After all, "hn" is the top-level domain for Honduras, and could stand for a million other things as well. It's probably accidental that it ever worked at all.
And what is the "best" result in your opinion? I'm getting the homepage of Hacker News (news.ycombinator) along with a nice description. I'm as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to this kind of stuff, but this is just plain ridiculous.
> It's not that PG has a grudge against Google (or vice versa) or anything like that. I believe that search engine bots crawl Hacker News hard enough that PG blocks most crawling by bots. In the case of Google, he does allow us to crawl from some IP addresses, but it's true that Google isn't able to crawl/index every page on Hacker News.
> And to show this isn't a Google-specific issue, note that Bing's #1 result for the search [hacker news] is a completely different site, thehackernews.com: http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news
> In general, I think PG's priority is to have a useful, interesting site for hackers. That takes precedence and is the reason why I believe PG blocks most bots: so that crawling doesn't overload the site.
16 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] threadBtw this is showing the pages indexed for the site HN. That its not showing in the results now for your brand WILL have devastating results on your traffic directly from Google. Though you might not care?
http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
This is arguably the best result for the query, since it explains what HN is about and provides a link to the front page. (People who have already used HN know where it is and don't need to search for it.)
I block cookies from Google, so they're not relying on my search history to give me relevant results.
And I'm not sure why searching for "HN" would be reasonably expected to get someone to Hacker News. After all, "hn" is the top-level domain for Honduras, and could stand for a million other things as well. It's probably accidental that it ever worked at all.
Specifically https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955043 from last week, complete with a response from Matt Cutts (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955374):
> It's not that PG has a grudge against Google (or vice versa) or anything like that. I believe that search engine bots crawl Hacker News hard enough that PG blocks most crawling by bots. In the case of Google, he does allow us to crawl from some IP addresses, but it's true that Google isn't able to crawl/index every page on Hacker News.
> Here's a link where I answered the same question about three weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5837004 , so this isn't a new issue. In fact, PG has been blocking various bots since 2011 or so; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277661 is one of the original discussions about this.
> And to show this isn't a Google-specific issue, note that Bing's #1 result for the search [hacker news] is a completely different site, thehackernews.com: http://www.bing.com/search?q=hacker+news
> In general, I think PG's priority is to have a useful, interesting site for hackers. That takes precedence and is the reason why I believe PG blocks most bots: so that crawling doesn't overload the site.
Google doesn't want other people (who are unaware google is selling their privacy to the NSA) to accidentally stumble across the comments on HN.
https://www.google.com/#q=google+sucks
https://www.google.com/#q=google+spying