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?
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.
Gosh
We just need years of community created content. EzPz
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?
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.worldor whatever instead of just “lemmy”.It might help it, as well. I believe in the Yandex source code leak they detail their algorithms SEO techniques. Might be a good lead
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.
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.
That’s a great point, I don’t know much at all about SEO, but I do know how much Google tailors everything to your profile.
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.
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 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 agree
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
I would love to Google search Lemmy instead of reddit. I just don’t know how feasible it would be being that Lemmy is decentralized.
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’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.
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.
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)
