most people i know use google by searching whatever question they have and including the word “reddit” at the end to find reddit threads since it currently has the most useful information.
As Lemmy gets more and more filled with useful threads and reviews it would be great if we can collectively improve Lemmy’s SEO so just including the word lemmy in a search will show lemmy threads related to the search.
The obscure tlds used in lemmy servers don’t help and lemmy.com currently redirects to lemm.ee. Is there a way we can improve the SEO of all instances or have lemmy.com be a aggregator of threads from many Lemmy servers?
We just need years of community created content. EzPz
I’ve been playing with googles search indexing and my personal instance. My instance is a subdomain named lemmy of my vanity URL I’ve kept for years. One thing I’ve noticed is that even though I run an instance with one user and one community, my personal website under the domain - which is static and lame - has risen from 50th to 23rd with certain search terms.
My point relative to the original question is that lemmy seems to be inherently interesting to googles crawlers and spiders and wtevs.
I don’t think iw oild be unreasonable for someone to make a search engine that is specifically for indexing lemmy posts. Seems like it would be a good addition to the lemmyverse site
It already exists https://search-lemmy.com
But you have to choose the instance you’re searching, that’s the opposite of what I want, I want to search all instances, or at least the top 100 or something, all at once
It does search all instances, the instance choosing is so links open in your preferred instance. Try it, you’ll see
Sadly, it doesn’t :(
That difference is probably because it respects which instances your chosen instance federates with. (It has to, to open it there)
I imagine that’s easy to change for people who really want to search everything
Oh man, it’s like when the search engines were battling back in the day. We need a Lemmy version of MetaCrawler.
Dogpile!
I think once there is enough info on lemmy it’ll just get to the point where the searches will bring up the information you need.
I feel like if I’m searching on Google I want it to take me to the most relevant source of information even if that still is reddit. It won’t always be. But it is still right now.
Nothing wrong with competition, it’ll give better search results.
If and when Lemmy proves it has staying power then search engines will adapt. It’s only been a month or so since it blew up.
Lemmy and other federated systems being spread out across individual instances does make things more difficult. Normally you could just do “site:reddit.com” and automatically filter all results to be from Reddit. But you can’t do that because your result could be on any one of hundreds of instances, many of which do not have “lemmy” in their title.
It appear reasonably large instances like lemmy.one have been indexed, i got results using site:lemmy.one. and for those larger instances, they should still be able to index federated content.
Maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, but lemmy.one has basically no content on it other than the 8 communities that @jonah has created or allowed there. The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
That is all to say, lemmy.one would be one of the “smaller” instances from a standpoint of content to be indexed by Google.
The whole point of that server is to allow people to simply login and then participate in other instances from there.
In order for users on lemmy.one to interact with content on other instances, lemmy.one has to import and host that content. So, it has plenty of content on it, just most of it originated elsewhere. That remote content should be just as indexable as local content.
I think it would be best if each post had a canonical tag pointed at the originating server’s version of that post. The lemmy ui generates a canonical tag now but I’m not sure it doesn’t just point to itself.
This sounds like a good idea for an issue on the Lemmy github.
Now that I’m on desktop, I checked and this was just added in 0.18.2: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1418
The weird thing (which they’re also discussing elsewhere in this thread: https://upvote.au/comment/148846) is that it links to OP’s instance rather than the community’s instance.
including the world “Reddit” at the end
I found that adding
"join Lemmy"works for Lemmy.Also https://fedi-search.com has a few more ideas
There is also https://www.search-lemmy.com/ which seems to work pretty well. It’s also open source
I think to some extent this is starting to work. I googled a software question the other day and found a lemmy answer within the first couple of results! Definitely better than a couple months ago where even searching for “lemmy” didn’t bring up lemmy among the top few.
It’ll happen if Lemmy gets big enough. I only worry about search engines getting tangled in the natural duplication of Lemmy posts.
Like, if a web crawler sees a Beehaw post, and then seees Lemmy.ml’s mirrored page of that same post, could it just show up as two different results? Could it work against the SEO in that it gets marked as “duplicate” or “spam” content in some way?
Like, if a web crawler sees a Beehaw post, and then seees Lemmy.ml’s mirrored page of that same post, could it just show up as two different results? Could it work against the SEO in that it gets marked as “duplicate” or “spam” content in some way?
The ideal solution is that the page has a canonical tag, telling search engines what the main URL for the content is: https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/. I don’t know if Lemmy already does this, nor do I know how well canonical tags work cross-domain as I’ve only ever used them for content on the same domain.
The ideal solution is that the page has a canonical tag, telling search engines what the main URL for the content is: https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonical-tags/. I don’t know if Lemmy already does this […]
I checked and it does, this post’s canonical is:
<link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://merv.news/post/26663">Weirdly it uses OP’s instance, in this case merv.news. Shouldn’t it be the instance where it was posted?
Canonical tags were added in 0.18.2.
I would think it’s because users only interact with their own instance. They would need to post it to their instance first before it can be forwarded to the appropriate community’s instance.
Unpopular opinion, but I don’t want that. I don’t want to start adding SEO stuff. If we have good content Google can figure out how to index it better themselves.
When I read the posy what I heard was: how do we ensure high quality content? If we have that, SE won’t need the O.
And I’m down for high quality.
Just curious, why not? Everything on the Fediverse is already public, by nature of federation. I think making the information shared here more easily discoverable is always a good thing.
there’s a lot of “exclusivity” behaviour on this community that I’ve noticed (and a loooot of us vs the mentality too, in regards to twitter/reddit/bluesky/mastodon)
Yeah, I think a lot of the new Reddit refugees are failing to realize that Lemmy and the Fediverse existed before the recent migration and expect everything to just work the way they want, instead of how it’s been working just fine without them for years. The Fediverse doesn’t “belong” to them, and open connections are what this platform is built on.
Not OP but I think the point is not to force it but just let it happen organically.
SEO really doesn’t work organically, though. That’s why there’s a whole industry devoted to it.
SEO is an industry devoted to undermining search engines’ ability to organically surface good content. Good content will still be surfaced on its own, just maybe not quite as quickly.
Good content will still be surfaced on its own
Not if you don’t do basic SEO at least… Things like ensuring that pages have:
- Good title tags, with the most important parts (post topic) at the start of the title
- Meta tags - description, keywords, canonical URL, etc
- Open Graph tags - for when links are shared on social media sites
- been optimized to load quickly - Google prioritises faster sites above slower ones
Plus the site should have a robots.txt and sitemap XML that’s been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.
Good content will still be surfaced on its own
Will it, though? This all seems like untested theory, to be honest.
While SEO may have started as a means of manipulating search engines, search engines have grown to adopt to new SEO techniques and now use those techniques as part of their built-in ranking systems. Outside of content that goes truly “viral”, I think it’s pretty difficult to get anything new to the top of a Google search without some massive SEO these days. Especially considering the head start that bigger players have already gotten on their SEO game, and the sheer wealth of content that search engines have to parse through.
I think maybe if we were still in 2010’s internet, that could be true. But search engines aren’t the same as they were in the past. SEO is the new norm.
I used to do a lot of SEO and run AdWords campaigns for smaller businesses back in the early days and they were always the norm. If anything Google has been constantly tweaking its algorithm to make it harder for non-organic SEO.
Something as huge as Lemmy that grows organically doesn’t even have to worry about SEO. The problem is that the Fediverse being so spread out is a nightmare for Google spiders to crawl and rank.
The problem is that the Fediverse being so spread out is a nightmare for Google spiders to crawl and rank.
Isn’t that exactly why we should put in some basic SEO?
Before this is of value we need to get another 100 million users and exist for 20 years
Why does it have to be just like your sister?
Because we will never reach a billion users and exist for 200 years like yo momma.
That’s that og Reddit spirit I crave
No thanks. This adds absolutely no value to the conversation. I get the humor, but why would one want to turn Lemmy into reddit instead of going to reddit to sooth the “cravings” ?
Eh… It has its place (especially if dude is going to set me up like that), and can be ignored if it’s not your cup of tea.
Prurient banter has been a part of online forums since BBS message boards. It’s how most people I know communicate IRL and online: Bullshit, bullshit, nugget of wisdom, picture of cat.
Not everything needs to be THUPER THERIAL, but it can be (and has frequently been) overdone because a lot of people don’t realize that self-censorship is a hammer to be swung heavily.
SEO takes loads of time. And since every instance is it’s own thing it takes more times to propogate this. I can only see a future where the most popular instances and communities are searchable in search engines. But I hope I’m wrong.
You normaly say that you have to wait about six months until google sees you.
I’ll be a bit scared doing that, with all the instances I’ve been thinking how easy it will be to have malware links. How is shi.t.justwo.rks or whatever less random than a malicious link?
Search engines have their own “trustworthiness” metric that they keep track of for sites they index. That’s why you usually don’t find malware in the top results for most searches, unless you’re going down some already shady rabbit holes.
This is going to present a formidable challenge because Lemmy is so decentralized. I mean I am all for it but wouldn’t even begin to conceptualize how to get started.
Not really… Nearly every phpBB, SMF, Invision forum etc is a separate self hosted community and they get indexed. Hell even small ones like one of my gaming guilds ranked high for specific key words.
For SEO to work well you need clear links to clear topics, and it helps to have automatic metada also to assist indexing.
Having google compatible site maps assists in crawling the site.
