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?

meyotch,

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.

cantstopthesignal,

We just need years of community created content. EzPz

candyman337,
@candyman337@lemmy.world avatar

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

nix,
@nix@merv.news avatar

It already exists search-lemmy.com

candyman337,
@candyman337@lemmy.world avatar

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

bzxt,

I agree

littlecolt,

Oh man, it’s like when the search engines were battling back in the day. We need a Lemmy version of MetaCrawler.

postmateDumbass,

Dogpile!

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

It does search all instances, the instance choosing is so links open in your preferred instance. Try it, you’ll see

Racle,
@Racle@sopuli.xyz avatar

Sadly, it doesn’t :(

sopuli.xyz search vs lemmy.world

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

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

wispydust,

including the world “Reddit” at the end

I found that adding “join Lemmy” works for Lemmy.

Also fedi-search.com has a few more ideas

ffejhog,

There is also www.search-lemmy.com which seems to work pretty well. It’s also open source

Reil,

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?

ComradeKhoumrag,
@ComradeKhoumrag@infosec.pub avatar

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

evatronic,

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”.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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: 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.

Olissipo,
@Olissipo@lemmy.pt avatar

The ideal solution is that the page has a canonical tag, telling search engines what the main URL for the content is: 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?

ClassyHatter,
@ClassyHatter@sopuli.xyz avatar

Canonical tags were added in 0.18.2.

AdmiralRob,

I would think it’s because users only interact with their own instance. They would need to post it to their instance first before it can be forwarded to the appropriate community’s instance.

Kushia,
@Kushia@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

bilb,
@bilb@lem.monster avatar

we cannot

Ab_intra,
@Ab_intra@lemmy.world avatar

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.

heimchen,

You normaly say that you have to wait about six months until google sees you.

mysoulishome,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

Before this is of value we need to get another 100 million users and exist for 20 years

Shardikprime,

Gosh

sarsaparilyptus,

Why does it have to be just like your sister?

dismalnow,
@dismalnow@kbin.social avatar

Because we will never reach a billion users and exist for 200 years like yo momma.

clausetrophobic,

That’s that og Reddit spirit I crave

Tiritibambix,
@Tiritibambix@lemmy.ml avatar

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” ?

dismalnow,
@dismalnow@kbin.social avatar

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.

imaqtpie,
@imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works avatar

Lmao well said

clausetrophobic,

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e37cef41-ef27-4a9f-8533-02a0c2e03863.webp

hoodlem,

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.

Chozo,

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.

can,

Not OP but I think the point is not to force it but just let it happen organically.

Chozo,

SEO really doesn't work organically, though. That's why there's a whole industry devoted to it.

koreth,

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.

Chozo,

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.

wanderingmagus,

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

CascadianBeam,

The silent majority are never going to have the time to blow on shit that people who get so mentally invested in this stuff do.

That’s what people don’t seem to understand. The silent majority is not mindless by choice. They’re mindless by design.

wanderingmagus,

So how do we reverse the trend? They didn’t start out that way, like you said, it was designed. So how do we undermine those designs?

Derproid,

Become the president or head of Congress.

wanderingmagus,

Revolution it is.

dan,
@dan@upvote.au avatar

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.

liontigerwings,

true when it comes to broad search terms, but google should bring lemmy to the top if you type in [search term] lemmy just like we do know with [search term] reddit.

gaytswiftfan,

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)

Chozo,

Yeah, I think a lot of the new Reddit refugees are failing to realize that Lemmy and the Fediverse existed before the recent migration and expect everything to just work the way they want, instead of how it's been working just fine without them for years. The Fediverse doesn't "belong" to them, and open connections are what this platform is built on.

APassenger,

When I read the posy what I heard was: how do we ensure high quality content? If we have that, SE won’t need the O.

And I’m down for high quality.

Wooly,

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?

Chozo,

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.

relative_iterator,
@relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works avatar

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.

Tigbitties,
@Tigbitties@kbin.social avatar

I'd rather find another solution. Imagine a fediverse search? Fuck google and their shitty SEO. It makes everything suck.

Hextic,

Eventually.

ffejhog,

The future is here: www.search-lemmy.com

Nollij,

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

ThaijsClan,

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.

shroomato,
@shroomato@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Kerrigor,
@Kerrigor@kbin.social avatar

It should in theory be easier as LLM searches improve... Bard etc

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