One thing Reddit dominates on is search results. I’m looking things up and seeing so many links to reddit, which I guess is going to help keep that place relevant (unless those subreddits stay dark).

I wondered how Lemmy and this fed thingy stuff all works for that? With more posts can we expect to see people arriving through search results?

  • kadu@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    One thing to keep in mind is that Google currently penalizes links that don’t end in the common top domains like “.com”, “.org” and similar. So something like lemmy.world, if indexed, will rank lower than a site ending in .com with the same keyword density.

    • Briongloid@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Google went from being the most important website on the internet to being more and more useless, it’s amazing seeing such a massive company go downhill. But they have so much money that they’ll be able to stay big forever from capital alone.

      • gun@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        What do you use as a search engine instead of Google? I feel like I’ve tried everything, but always end up back at Google search.

        • Ministar@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Been using Ecosia and so far its been very good. I did not have a need to use Google once.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Let Google be irrelevant. It kind of already is there in the absence of Reddit.

      The nerds always blaze a trail when boring old entrenched media ruins good things. In this case the thing being ruined is a search engine that makes the critical mistake of assuming a traditionally “prestigious” .com equates value. Fuck the old establishment, it’s time to ditch decrepit big tech and remake the internet the way it was meant to be. It’s time to reinvent how we share and discover content.

  • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.comEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the X-Robots-Tag response header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.

    Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.

    So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.

  • Monkey With A Shell@lemmy.socdojo.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    A lot of search engines rely on backlinks to rank the reliablitly/validity of a site so even if a given instance was picked up to have enough places reference it to be seen as a valid source would ve a pretty heavy lift.

  • Ben@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I actually added a custom search engine to Firefox… so I can search something on Lemmy. I have the keyword ‘LW’ for Lemmy.World search right now (because Lemmy.ml was offline a while).

    Basically, do the Lemmy search (search term ssss) then edit/replace ssss > %s and copy the entire link. https://lemmy.world/search/q/%s/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1

    Then using ‘add custom search engine’ extension on Firefox, you add it.

  • Djokkum@rammy.siteEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    I would expect Lemmy to show up equally in the search results if there is enough relevant content. My tiny tiny instance is already showing up in search results, crawlers can definitely find stuff on here. It would be great if at some point we can append “lemmy” to search queries to get the good stuff like we could with Reddit.