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How is it that questions posted to the Stack Overflow show up as #1 in Google search results just minutes after being submitted? What SEO practices are being used to generate this sort of up-to-the-minute accuracy?

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3 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

Sites with high PR and are frequently updated will have their sites crawled more quickly then normal. So it's not a technique, per sé, so much as it is a result of the site being popular and constantly changing.

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That's true, but Google won't crawl a site each 30 seconds. You can test it. You can post a question in SO, and it almost immediately would appear in your Google SERP. So, there should be a technique. Some kind of publisher/subscriber pattern. For example, SO may have this right to directly call a Google Bot, for newly created questions. – Saeed Neamati Mar 1 at 8:59
Google will crawl a site every 30 seconds if it is popular enough and has lots of fresh content. – John Conde♦ Mar 1 at 11:40
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up vote 5 down vote

First of all pigeons think very highly of the Stack Overflow. But according to Jeff's post it's not all rose pedals for them.This is an example of some thing they did to do better at Google.

But seriously go lookup pageranking, site indexing and be more specific about what's wrong, or where you would like to improve.

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up vote 1 down vote

I've done a LOT of experimenting with Google rankings. I know I posted a question to one of the stack exchanges sites and was surprised that the question hit my Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) withing 24 hours.

Google always ranks Wikipedia and Stack Overflow really highly. I believe there are two reasons for this.

1) Neither of these two sites "sell" anything. They are informational. Google knows that any Wikipedia page has no hidden agenda. Anyone who visits one of their pages will find what they are looking for, probably more than they are looking for.

2) Both of these sites are constantly being updated and rely on content created by intelligent users who aren't selling anything. Again, 99% of answers really shed light on myriad topics.

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Unfortunately selling something has nothing to do with rankings. Content is content whether it is an article, a picture, a product, etc. Those sites rank well because they have quality content and lots of incoming links (amongst other things). – John Conde♦ Mar 9 '11 at 17:20
Perhaps you are correct, in one respect. But, said "content is content" and then, in the next sentence, you qualified content, saying "they have quality content". Sites that sell tend to not have quality content. They tend to be ultra-focused and spammy. There is a direct relationship between "not selling" and quality content and high rankings. You don't see that? – Evik James Mar 9 '11 at 17:41
No, I do not. Lots of sites sell stuff and aren't spammy at all. Plus there are sites that sell stuff and rank well... when someone is looking for a product. Informational sites and ecommerce sites do not often cross paths and would explain why you don't see the two in the same search results. – John Conde♦ Mar 9 '11 at 17:44
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I don't think selling means spammy, but spammy does probably mean selling. So they are related, but only in one direction. I do think that the high quality of information from SO and Wikipedia and similar sites helps their high rankings, but Amazon also gets ranked pretty high on searches relavent to items it sells. – lovefaithswing Mar 9 '11 at 17:50
I said: "They tend to be ultra-focused and spammy". Do you NOT see the word "tend"? If I say "it tends to be warm in Hawaii", this should NOT be confused with "it's warm in Hawii RIGHT NOW". Read what I wrote, not what you thought I meant. Don't you owe me that? – Evik James Mar 9 '11 at 21:59
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