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When you search for 'stackoverflow' on Google, you get the following screen: alt text

I'm curious what special abilities Tom and Ngu have to get on the Google search? I'd expect the top users to appear there.

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  • 5
    I declare shennanigans!
    – user27414
    Jan 13, 2010 at 21:04

7 Answers 7

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I have to periodically go through and clean up the sitelinks in Google webmaster tools.

For some reason Google enjoys escalating some user profiles to sitelink level...

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  • 28
    You're just jealous.
    – user27414
    Jan 14, 2010 at 4:12
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    If you want to fix that permanently by having 8 links, I would volunteer to have my account added. No need for compensation, I'm willing to make that sacrifice for the team.
    – Michael Stum
    Jan 14, 2010 at 6:46
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    well for the record my profile was a sitelink on meta and I removed it as well (I went through all the trilogy sites in webmaster tools while I was at it). No nepotism allowed at Stack Overflow!
    – Jeff Atwood
    Jan 14, 2010 at 7:28
  • @Michel: I'm aware you were just kidding but since not everyone may know this, you can only tell google to not display a certain sitelink; you can't tell google which ones to display.
    – Andreas Bonini
    Apr 26, 2010 at 12:30
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    Looks like it's happening again, with user "OMG Ponies" and user "Kendal Helmstetter Gelner" google.com/…
    – George Stocker
    Aug 18, 2010 at 13:18
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    Can we please leave OMG Ponies?
    – Engineer2021
    Aug 31, 2010 at 21:40
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I don't see this. When I google Stack Overflow it just says "Did you mean Jon Skeet?", and the only result is his profile page.

Courtesy of @Bobby:

The real Google results if you search for StackOverflow

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And just for the records, the current sitelinks are really showing a professional side of the site:

alt text

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  • 5
    OMGWTFBBQ ROFLOLMAO
    – user138231
    Aug 18, 2010 at 13:32
  • 5
    EPIC WIN!!!!!!!
    – user27414
    Aug 18, 2010 at 13:36
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    Ahahahahahahahaha!
    – Pekka
    Aug 18, 2010 at 13:42
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    Niiiiiiiicccceee....
    – Engineer2021
    Aug 31, 2010 at 21:41
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Holy Crap this scared me. Wake up this morning, drudge through things, go into Meta, see this and think "Oh crap, I didn't cover things up well enough..."

But yea, what Jeff said. That's definitely the secret. Weird I missed this the first go-around months back.

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Maybe there are more links from outside the stackoverflow domain pointing to their profiles?

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Now it's two other users...

May be there should be more sections for Google's sake. May be a podcast section (is it defunct?), or a more prominently linked http://jobs.stackoverflow.com, or may be a link to the canonical question on SO. Also Meta is suspiciously absent from there.

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  • 3
    ok, I blocked those as well. Eventually it will fill up with non-user links.. hopefully.. sigh.. my /users/{id}/name block list is enormous now on every trilogy site, you'd think Google would figure this out eventually.
    – Jeff Atwood
    Apr 26, 2010 at 10:02
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This has been mentioned before, but it was about Super User.

Although Jeff mentions there that it should be fixed.

Something must have brought this back...

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