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’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.
We just need years of community created content. EzPz
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
Oh man, it’s like when the search engines were battling back in the day. We need a Lemmy version of MetaCrawler.
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
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?
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”.
