How visible is lemmy on search engine?

Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 3 points – 1 years ago

I was wondering if the nature of decentralization would negatively affect SEO, since people can access the same post from many different instance

https://lemmy.ml/robots.txt , https://lemmy.world/robots.txt , etc don't seem to disallow posts, so the text-based content should be easy to index, at least for these instances.

An earlier post pointed out: federated sites seem like they will suffer against central content in a SEO world - regardless of whether they are technically indexable.

I wonder if lemmy should have a SEO friendly federated site... .com domain, robots.txt and everything else...

right, though the SEO game is changing drastically with AI. People are using GPT-like models often in place of searches and likewise, expecting search results to hit their answers rather than being vague pointers. Following this reasoning, the search engines will need direct users to where the valuable information is, not always, but often enough to not lose users to competitors.

So the thing about SEO is that it's often an attention game that advertisers and smaller websites compete with each other. The information in public forums and threads is invaluable for the success of the search engine itself, so they're the ones that will eventually have to adapt to the new federated reality, should it become mainstream - and I do hope so.

Google brings it up

Oh, good point. Yes, probably? We can not simply assume search engines know that all of these point to the same content:

Or even worse, due to defederation, they may not all point to the exact same content.

Without further investment either from lemmy or the search engine's side, they are probably seen as distinct sources, not aggregated. Which makes each individually less relevant and less likely to show up .

Also note none of the adresses above contain 'lemmy'. How would users search for content on lemmy in these cases? Can't do "technology site:lemmy", or?

But I can say, lemmy content is visible. Haven't seen it on the first page of ecosia yet, but on page 2 or 3.

Maybe you could use use site:lemmy.ml, because they federate with most instances, they're likely to have most of lemmy's content?

The second link for me when searching for Lemmy on Google is the link to the "Join Lemmy" website. Surprisingly, Brave Search, which has seemingly no search bubbles or accounts, shows the same.

Sorry I didnt make the post very clear. I was referring to an individual posts when people search for a specific issue/discussion in Lemmy.