

Ask HN: Are upvotes considered a factor in search ranking? - spraveen80
http://spraveen.posterous.com/upvotes-and-page-ranking

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benologist
I doubt they are:

1) the volume of popular stories on digg/reddit/stumbleupon/hn etc cover a
miniscule portion of the internet and aren't necessarily more important or
better than the overwhelming majority of the internet.

2) Google can't trust votes/users, and in lots of cases can't even see who
made the vote let alone decide whether user x on site y is legitimate. They
also can't trust the sites to handle that themselves - they get gamed all day
every day with fake accounts/paid submitters (even on HN!), manufactured
content, summary spam etc.

3) every site implements/displays it differently which would mean scraping
most of the time, and tapping into APIs only some of the time.

There are SEO benefits though like people linking to your site because of the
popular submission, your site spending a day or two on a high-PR website's
front page etc.

~~~
spraveen80
I agree point 2 and 3 could be too challenging to overcome. But on point 1, a
story could be important for a search query considering who has upvoted it.

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theDoug
Short answer: No, but many search engines are increasingly aware of the
microformat data you may wish to supply.
(<http://www.google.com/help/features.html> of some examples)

This info shows up when you search for things like movies and Google shows "3
1/2 stars" or "starts 7:30pm." I forget the format's exact name but there's a
lot you can provide.

