How can we improve Lemmy’s SEO so we can google “(question) lemmy” instead of relying on “(question) reddit”
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?
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.
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.
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 [...]
If/When Lemmy and other federated services grow to the point that's an issue in major search engines, said search engines should be smart enough to group and/or suppress mirrored results.
You can see that sort of thing in Google now for major sites like Reddit and StackOverflow, though it's more along the lines of "the same question in a different post".
You can also, in the interim, just pick an instance and add, site:lemm.world or whatever instead of just "lemmy".
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.
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)
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.
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.
Keep in mind how Google works. It's taking your metrics into consideration. So someone who has never Googled lemmy likely wouldn't have seen thst same result.
Part of the problem is that there aren’t really a lot of questions/answers yet. You should try asking your questions here and hopefully over time we’ll have a big backlog of content.
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
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
While being decentralized certainly creates a barrier, most of the details behind PageRank (and the other algorithms in use by Google) are pretty well documented. If it doesn't already, throwing in Lemmy as a keyword should soon bring up a Lemmy intense (probably Lemmy.ml or Lemmy.World) as a top result. As people click those links, the results will go higher.
The bigger challenge is that the content you are trying to find isn't here yet. Those results on the old site were built over years of massive user engagement. Lemmy has barely had a month since people started joining en masse, and it's still a fraction of what we lost.
TL;DR: Just keep using it and spread the word. The rest will happen naturally
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.
I could see Google integrating with the fediverse once it reaches critical mass. Using ActivityPub for indexing ought to be more efficient than the usual web crawling.
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'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.