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?
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.
What if we wanted to reject and change the new norm, just as we rejected Reddit and Twitter and started the Fediverse?
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.
