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Ask HN: why Google doesn't see HN as a link farm?

8 points by timrivera ↗ HN
Honest question. We know Google [1] (Bing and other s.e.) is fighting an endless war against link farms. AFAIK HN doesn't use rel="nofollow" [2] (EDIT: not entirely true, see comments below) so its link juice may flow to any website that is submitted. However, HN and its linked sites don't seem to be negatively affected nor penalized. What makes HN different from what Google consider a link farm?

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

[2] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569

9 comments

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mooism2
Afaik, HN uses rel=nofollow on all links below a certain score.
timrivera
Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know that.
gus_massa
I looked in https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and apparently the nofollow disappears when the story gets 6 point. The number may change without prior notice. Perhaps they are using a more complicated secret criterion.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
lkrubner
Other comments already pointed out the use of "nofollow". But it is also worth a mention that old, well established sites of high rank link to Hacker News. Most link farms do not have incoming links from highly ranked sites, so the existence of such links is another clue that Google uses to distinguish a discussion forum like Hacker News from a link farm.
timrivera
> Most link farms do not have incoming links from highly ranked sites

That's a good point I didn't consider.

memracom
Uhm, Google doesn't do PageRank anymore. Now their algorithms are driven by people's choices. They know which links people click when they do a search, and they also have "focus groups" who provide ratings of how useful sites are. They use that info to derive algorithms, but at the root, there are people constantly providing feedback to Google, and link farms have no way to escape that.

And of course, lots of people provide favourable feedback for HN so it is not treated like a link farm.

eloff
Source? AFAIK they use over a hundred metrics including PageRank and what you're talking about.
AznHisoka
In recent days, Google doesn't even SEE HN. I think it's because HN is blocking Google for being too aggressive in crawling.