[monkeybutton]

Interesting that the most comments it got before was 11, and today it succeeds and makes it to the front page! This is a good illustration of whether or not submissions get any traction can be fairly stochastic.

On topic, stack overflow does exactly what the article is talking about; They lock down their sitemap and make special exceptions for the Google bot:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/98087

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33965/how-does-stac...

I can understand SO's reasoning but it only perpetuates the incumbents' stranglehold on the internet.

[jszymborski]

I think it's partly because they create a website which reported on the status of the Ever Given which rose to 1. on the front page.

I feel like I often see submissions which are, even tangentially, related to front page material rise very quickly.

Regardless, congrats to Knuckleheads Club for fighting the good fight.

[skinkestek]

You are right, that was how I found it.

[judge2020]

> They lock down their sitemap and make special exceptions for the Google bot:

Their robots.txt, on the other hand, is more restrictive of Googlebot:

https://stackoverflow.com/robots.txt

  User-agent: Googlebot-Image
  Disallow: /*/ivc/*
  Disallow: /users/flair/
  Disallow: /jobs/n/*
  ..