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As soon as you post a question on Stack Overflow, in 5-10 seconds it starts to appear on Google Search Results. How that works? Is that the result of a very high page rank or there is some kind of alliance between Google and Stack Overflow? If you don't believe, you can try it to make sure.

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  • i just tried Yahoo and Bing. the same story... they index StackOverflow pages very fast... I'm so jealous =)
    – Jack
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:51
  • Optimised content does not explain the speed of indexing. A high PageRank and known high post rate will speed up crawling but even that can't get you a guaranteed almost instant index. I would suspect some sort of push notification that Google subscribes to. E.g. an RSS feed and PUBSUBHUBUB service. Commented May 30, 2013 at 5:25

3 Answers 3

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I think the question is how they rank not just appear.

It says here that:

"The Golden Rule of SEO: Content is King" is the first thing to consider. It's quite simple: have good content. That's the primary reason Stack Overflow has a chance to rank at Google, simply because of how page ranking works.

Websites that have no optimization or guidelines concerns whatsoever but got nice stuff have a great chance of ranking high, because there will be people linking to good content. And most sites trying to do SEO without content won't rank well because nobody will link to them.

With that been said, Stack Overflow does a lot of work from a long time ago to keep clean HTML code.

One good example is how rel='canonical' is applied in here to keep search engines away from linking to duplicate content. For instance, let's get this page source:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/14056/seo-in-stackoverflow">

That is an optimization that will not help to directly rank in the search engine, but it will make the results the engine can find much more relevant and through that it might generate more links (from people who found what they were looking for) to the good content it already have, thus actually indirectly improving its rank.

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  • ok, i know that stackoverflow uses a clean html and it's content is great. the page rank is also very high which is 7. the same thing with codeproject.com. a very high page rank, and a great content. but new articles on codeproject will not appear on google without few hours. i'm just surprised how fast google indexes the stackoverflow pages...
    – Jack
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:47
  • Wait, are you searching the same or exact keywords? same with code project?
    – Mark
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:48
  • exact keyword. it doesn't matter if i'm searching the exact keyword or some, what really matters is Google indexes too fast, like stackoverflow and google uses one single database... =)
    – Jack
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:53
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    No they aren't. Actually, the explanation is clear. SO posts are SEO Optimize. Or shall I say more optimize than CodeProject. That I think answers the question.
    – Mark
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:55
  • SO developers understand how google indexing works giving the advantage over their search engine.
    – Mark
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:56
  • got it. thanks. so that is all about SEO Optimization, if the page is highly optimized for SE, and the page rank is high, SEs index the page so fast. is that it?
    – Jack
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:58
  • Yes.. Exactly..
    – Mark
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 5:23
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See: Why does Google index pages of my blog in seconds, while pages on the rest of the website take longer to get indexed

When something appears in Google in seconds, it is generally because there is something notifying Google about this new content. http://pingomatic.com/ is a service that can be used for this purpose. WordPress integrates with it by default which allows blogs powered by WordPress to get listed in Google very quickly.

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I think it has something to do with how unique most of the questions on S/O are. They're not typically questions being written about elsewhere.

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  • i don't think that is the only reason. there must be some trick to make google index the page in 5-10 seconds. that is an incredible thing.
    – Jack
    Commented May 30, 2013 at 3:42

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