
Want to get hundreds of backlinks for free? Get to the Hacker News front page - rblion
https://jic94.com/backlinks-hacker-news-aggregators/
======
jawns
Either the author is misunderstanding things or I am.

I was under the impression that HN had a relatively liberal policy on
scrapers, allowing hobbyists to scrape the content and present it in
alternative UIs, such as [https://hckrnews.com](https://hckrnews.com) or
[http://hn.elijames.org](http://hn.elijames.org)

That doesn't seem analogous to PBNs, where the value they add is not a better
browsing interface but just some extra link juice.

~~~
Juliancanlas
Oops, thank you! I wasn't completely sure about this either. But you may be
right that the reasons are less sinister than they are!

------
thrower123
How many HN clones using X new JS framework XYZ or UI reskins are out there in
the wild using the Firebase API? It feels like you see one on the front page
at least once a week. And that is what almost all of these sites shown in the
screenshots of the article are, not some kind of grey/black hat SEO
optimization ring.

~~~
Juliancanlas
Interesting! Do you have any clue on why these websites are being made? Reddit
also has many aggregators, but some of them are literal blogger websites.

~~~
thrower123
HN is a relatively simple, well understood web site, and there is an easy-to-
use API that one can get access to without much ceremony. It's almost as
common a "getting started" type project for a new front-end framework as
creating yet another todo list app.

I've assigned it as a take-home project for job candidates before.

------
jimueller
You are jumping to conclusions. Because the HN UI is not everyone's cup of
tea, there are a lot of people that have reworked the UI for mobile, etc.
Also, there isn't or wasn't an HN API, so scraping was the only option.
Finally, there's a lot of people who take on the exercise for fun, so you get
"HN in VueJS" which aren't nefarious, just exercises.

Look at your results, why would you think "React HN clone" on github.io was
something other than just a personal fun project.

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RandomBacon
Is HN becoming too popular?

I don't want HN to become a place where people game things.

~~~
anthilemoon
The good thing is that it's currently impossible to game things I think. My
blog is mentioned in this article. I post all of my articles on HN and so far
I haven't noticed any pattern that would help me predict which ones will do
well. The algorithm seems pretty robust.

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greatjack613
I thought the value of backlinks was dependent on the number of backlinks the
backlink has, so if all the backlinks are random scrapers with little traffic,
why should it boost seo?

~~~
Juliancanlas
Hey, I'm the author of this article :D. It's included in the article. They
still give out SEO juice regardless.

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cryptozeus
Great analysis. Interesting side effect of devs hobby projects scrapping off
the HN has created pbns like impact on seo.

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yoz-y
Unsurprising. And also not really actionable advice.

