Re:Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
by rodw on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:55PM
(#29412695)
Funny, it was the "lots of internal linking" bit that felt wrong to me. Not that these low-quality sites don't do that, but I'm surprised to hear that the new algorithm rewards internal links. I'm certainly not a full-time SEO guy, but I happen to have or work with a few sites - some fairly established - that make extensive use of internal links for design/editorial reasons. As far as I can tell they are helpful for (a) user navigation and (b) getting search engines to discover/index the pages but I don't think I've seen any notable advantage in or even impact on ranking based on those internal links (whether in the body copy or in head/foot/side "navigation" areas).
Searching just now I do see some other sources making a similar claim, so maybe I'm just out of the loop. But in my cursory scan I haven't found much detail or real evidence beyond "google says they matter" either. I mean, that's not why those internal links were created in the first place, but it sure would be nice to get a ranking boost out of them too. I wonder what I'm doing wrong :)
Re:Ask HN: What are these low quality “code snippet” sites?
by phil294 on Wednesday December 01, 2021 @11:31PM
(#29412588)
...which even applies if you enclose the specific term with quotes. These used to help against unrelated results, but not so much anymore. I don't know why. Same thing with DDG and Bing.
If only... it seems like the search results have gotten far worse for exact-matching. I regularly search for part numbers and markings, somewhere where exact matches are pretty much the only thing I want, and I can clearly see the decline over the years as it starts including more and more results that don't even have the string I'm looking for.