It is impressive that Google manages to rank reddit threads very well though. They don't have reddits internal data, do they look at reddit upvote scores or what? Why would the helpful thread be higher ranked than all the content spam on reddit? Google must do something really clever in order to be so good at indexing useful reddit threads.

I would think they apply their normal algorithms.

If it's a good article that's upvoted a lot, it should also be linked in some places and thus get a higher search score.

Though it's not finding the article. It's finding a link to the article on Reddit. I hope people aren't linking to the Reddit thread...

The way the original pagerank algorithm works, links to the original article would increase the score of a Reddit post linking to the article. Why Reddit posts are ranked higher in a default search I’m not sure, but this would definitely explain why site:Reddit works.

Do people link to reddit threads a lot? I'd assume such a signal would be very noisy and not very reliable, so spam sites would just link a lot to their content spam on reddit.

Like giving Reddit a higher “page score” than other websites?

No, I mean why does it find the right reddit thread instead any of the billions of other reddit threads? That can't be trivial to do since reddit themselves don't do it well.

Gotcha. Google search ranking threads versus Reddit search ranking threads.

I’d posit that Google counts the upvotes and other signals on the thread to calculate EAT or whatever.

It was probably linked to by other websites. I've been seeing more news organizations directly linking to reddit, and I believe Google manually boosted reddit results a few years ago. You used to never see them in search results, but now they have started showing up.

I've found that Google is willing to return one or two Reddit links but then reverts to its usual SEO crapspam for the rest of the results. Even "site:reddit.com" only returns only a fraction of the discussions related to the topic. The site's been around for over a decade, and most topics have been discussed dozens of times or more.

The Reddit trick is increasingly less viable as marketers are astroturfing Reddit.

That's been a significant factor on reddit since 2008 or so. It may be getting worse or the dynamics changing, idk, but it's nowhere near new.

One advantage is that Reddit has a distributed network of volunteer mods whos incentives align with that of their own subreddit.

Google on the other hand has automated centralized content moderation.

Agreed. What I've seen become more common is the following:

* They'll start by having <5 real comments that seem like a legitimate person wrote them * Account suddenly starts just re-posting very popular older posts, and other bots chime in that also copy the top comments from that post letter-for-letter * Account goes on to shill some product

It's just the state of the web. Google search uses metrics for the web sites (number of links, etc) so Reddit threads do not rank high compared to real web sites.

Google used to have a "Forums" tab right on the top that would filter results to random PHPbb instances and the like. It was generally pretty great. As far as I'm concerned, the decision to remove that was when Google started dying.

This is my experience too, every time I'm looking for meaningful results, after searching my bookmarks of course.

Uh, reddit is 99% influencers influencing these days. You enthusiastically consumed and even recommended an ad and have no idea.

You can't even tell who they are anymore. How do I know? Because I've been paid to post on reddit. I only do it for products I've actually used and things I like, but I got paid nobody has a clue. Not even you.