

Ask HN: Why does HN have a relatively low Google PageRank? - danso

Don't know if this is the way it's always been, but HN's pagerank seems low given its relative popularity...At first I thought it was egregiously low, because https://news.ycombinator.com registers as a 3. But I see that the canonical link for the homepage (the first thing that comes up when you Google "Hacker News") is:<p>https://news.ycombinator.com/news<p>Which has a score of 5.<p>Interestingly enough, the submission link (https://news.ycombinator.com/submit) has a PageRank of 6.<p>I know HN doesn't rely on SEO and such, I just thought that popularity alone (and its threads are commonly linked to, especially by the OP's themselves) would give it a higher-than-5 PageRank.<p>(I'm retrieving PageRank by using one of the various external scripts/websites out there for this purpose, such as http://www.pagerank-checker.com/ or the Chrome extension)
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pg
Probably because we restrict their crawlers. But this is an excellent side
effect, because the last thing I want is traffic from Google searches.

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derrida
If you really want to make it difficult for people to find this place, an idea
might be to raise the technical threshold required to view it: serve it on
telnet like a BBS-era board, or run it as a Tor hidden service, or better yet:
both!

It might be a bad idea for some reason I cannot conceive of right now.

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soneca
One thing is not want people wondering around, looking for a quick random
answer, as this site is pretty much about community.

Other is make it difficult to access by a random, specific criteria, such as
technical hability. Yes, I am no tech hacker, never used Tor, but I try to be
part of this community as valuable member. I think community is about aligning
interests, not an exclusivist club.

