[memracom]

Uhm, Google doesn't do PageRank anymore. Now their algorithms are driven by people's choices. They know which links people click when they do a search, and they also have "focus groups" who provide ratings of how useful sites are. They use that info to derive algorithms, but at the root, there are people constantly providing feedback to Google, and link farms have no way to escape that.

And of course, lots of people provide favourable feedback for HN so it is not treated like a link farm.

[eloff]

Source? AFAIK they use over a hundred metrics including PageRank and what you're talking about.