Doing SEO for a news publisher as my main job some first hints about what could be improved at Stacker News to make it more visible on Google and other search engines

1.1) Currently every post like #13799 and all replies #13804 have URLs. I would recommend let Search engines just index the original post (but with all the replies) as one URLs. Replies should not be indexable. Replies alone are hard to understand coming from Google. In general search engines like bigger posts with more content - could be done by grouping the whole thread into one indexable URL. There is different ways how to solve this. In general I would recommend to rid of URLs which are not used by users + which are thin content (that's many of the comments) and solve it differently

1.2) Speking URLs are still a thing for search engines. https://stacker.news/The-Insiders-Are-Yelling-Warning-Signs/13814 is nicer than #13814

1.3) I would avoid special chars in URLs https://stacker.news/~job

1.4) 3 URLs for every user with posts or comments could be reduced to one by just adding everything below on e.g. https://stacker.news/cointastical I don't expect that users on Google search for profiles of stacker.news

1.5) I would recommend to reduce links to user profiles e.g. on the homepage. The content is usually more important than user profiles for search engines. This could be solved by replacing the a href link with a button or something javascript like. Google will just follow a href links

1.6) On home there are always 3 a href links to every post. The title, the comments and the date. Just make the title an a href link. The link text is important to guide search engines, what the link goal is about. 4 comments or 4 Mar is telling search engines bots nothing.

1.7) Google will not click the "more" button at the bottom of the page. So they cannot reach older articles. I would recommend to have a pagination an maybe an archive which lists all posts of each month and links to prev and next months.

1.8) An XML sitemap would be useful too

1.9) This should not be indexable https://stacker.news/search?q=bitcoin. Search should never be indexed

There is probably more to find here

The are some realy good long reads on stacker.news but the current structure make it hard to rank them in e.g. Google Top Stories (that's the with image news posts in Google), Google Disover or Google News. The content does not fullfil the requirements to be ranked in those services yet. I'm not sure if the standard stacker.news could make it into those but if the contend would curated and extended it should be worth a try.

2.1) Images are needed

2.2) Article markups are needed https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/article?hl=en

2.3) A news xml sitemap is need. Rss feeds are recommended too

2.3) <h1> is needed also more descriptive <title> and meta description would help

Ok I will stop here. I think there are a lot of technical issues which should be solved as a starting point. As a follow up that's part 2) already there is a lot of stategic potentical with SEO for stacker.news. Happy to help @k00b.