I visit Hacker News everyday by searching the name in Google and clicking the first result.<p>This morning the site was at 5th place - and now the first link in is 8th place and a specific submission, not the home page.<p>What's going on?
For reference, there is another discussion about this here:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=3277661</a><p>A few people from Google, including Matt Cutts, are taking part in that discussion.
Google is ranking other sites for that phrase, most famously it happened when RRW (or maybe Mashable) became the #1 result for facebook login.<p>You can solve this by typing news.ycombinator.com in the address bar, the phrase 'hacker news' is vague enough that rightly or wrongly YC might not always hold the #1 position.
This is interesting. From an SEO perspective, the phrase "hacker news" doesn't appear many times on the site itself, but surely a great many incoming links must use that text.<p>at most 228 days ago the title tag changed from "Hacker News | $title" to "$title | Hacker News": <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430542</a><p>But that's quite a long time back so I'd be surprised if that has anything to do with it.<p>I have noticed that Google does put a huge amount of weight on domain name keywords, but thehackernews.com was registered in Oct 2010, so it's not like it's only just appeared.<p>Can't really see any reason for this.
Usually if I type "ne" in the URL line on my browsers (any of my browsers that I use regularly), I see the full URL of Hacker News displayed as the URL to go to. It is startling to NOT see the true, orange Hacker News displayed as the top result when I do a Google search on the title of the site. Maybe more of us need to put up more organic links with well chosen link text to this site from sites that are in our control. (Perhaps we should surround that link text with comments about the site guidelines here before doing that, however.)
I wonder if it is a side effect of the recent algorithm change that promotes more 'timely' matches. The fact that 'news' is in the search term list might exacerbate this effect.
Search results may be different depending on what you've been searching recently, it's the personalization of search <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274207" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3274207</a> .
Given the users who visit here, we could prop it up to #1 overnight.<p>Saying that, doesn't HN block search bots from going deep? I remember reading that somewhere.
use a seeks proxy, it will personalize results for you and let hacker news float on top after the first click, and according to clicks on other instances through p2p. <a href="http://www.seeks-project.info" rel="nofollow">http://www.seeks-project.info</a> or seeks.fr.