Ask HN: Why is Reddit so poorly ranked in Google results?

12 points by krembo 12y ago ↗ HN

Although it is one of the most popular discussion boards on the internet, only rarely you see them in Google search results. Any ideas?

8 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 21.9 ms ] thread

nemasu 12y ago ↗

I have no idea, but looking at their robots file made me laugh:

User-Agent: bender Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass

User-Agent: Gort Disallow: /earth

bjourne 12y ago ↗

http://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1jyo8k/why_d...

Found the link, ironically, by googling for it.

krembo 12y ago ↗

well, apparently it is related to the robots.txt, however this is very weird as reddit are leaving alot of traffic behind.

SixSigma 12y ago ↗

If you want links from reddit use the site tag :

    portify site:reddit.com

dm2 12y ago ↗

When I search for "portify reddit" (without quotes) the first result is from reddit.com, in both my logged in search results and from an incognito window.

Is there an example of a Google search phrase that reddit.com should rank higher for?

SixSigma 12y ago ↗

Yep. I got that search term from a link in the comments complaining that the link wasn't top.

I have no idea about other searches.

What I do know is that the worst search engine for searching reddit is the one on reddit.

karishmasibal 12y ago ↗

Yes even I haven't seen any google result showing reddit links.

_hadrian_ 12y ago ↗

Probably due to a lot of poor quality content. Have you seen the front page of Reddit these days if you log out? Imagine reddit results along with all those crummy wikihow and expertsexchange results.