I tried to find the link for the Searching for Outliers post by Ben Kuhn, but the google search results here are quite weird, listing benkuhn’s profile page but not the post itself. Any idea why?
Google likely sees the real Searching for Outliers as being https://www.benkuhn.net/outliers/ and thus reasonably down weights the post on LessWrong in the search ranking.
I do think that this behavior is reasonable. Crossposting to LessWrong shouldn’t make the post on the original blog harder to find via Google.
When setting up automatic crossposting, authors can ask us to make it so that all crossposts automatically have the rel=canonical tag set, pointing to the original post. Ben Kuhn asked us to do this, so the HTML directly says “when indexing this, go to this other URL to find the canonical version of this post”.
I tried to find the link for the Searching for Outliers post by Ben Kuhn, but the google search results here are quite weird, listing benkuhn’s profile page but not the post itself. Any idea why?
Google likely sees the real Searching for Outliers as being https://www.benkuhn.net/outliers/ and thus reasonably down weights the post on LessWrong in the search ranking.
I do think that this behavior is reasonable. Crossposting to LessWrong shouldn’t make the post on the original blog harder to find via Google.
When setting up automatic crossposting, authors can ask us to make it so that all crossposts automatically have the
rel=canonical
tag set, pointing to the original post. Ben Kuhn asked us to do this, so the HTML directly says “when indexing this, go to this other URL to find the canonical version of this post”.