Are search engines able to index Lemmy?
I still keep seeing all search engines link to Reddit, but nothing from Lemmy is linked in organic search results.
I’m expecting big push towards Lemmy to happen when Google returns Lemmy links.
Reddit has orders of magnitude more content than Lemmy. Reddit also has better SEO. I don’t think Google is purposely not showing Lemmy content, we just don’t have enough content to show.
If you do a search for something like “selfhost site:Lemmy.*” then you get results so the boards are definitely getting indexed. The SEO just isn’t there to make it what Google thinks is a better choice when compared to other sites. That may change as these sites get used more and more things are posted and discussed but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google algorithm weighs reddit posts higher than other sites simply because reddit has become such a great resource for things.
What about Lemmy instances which don’t have an URL starting with “lemmy”? How will a typical Google user filter results if he’s interested in all Lemmy instances? DuckDuckGo to the rescue? 👽
In theory one of the big instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml should be indexed and searchable using the site: tag, and their local caches of communities originating on other instances should be included. It might mean that Google returns multiple duplicate pages (one for each instance indexed) however, unless Google takes steps to reduce duplication. Time will tell I guess.
Reddit also has decades of back linking and other behaviours that increase its page rank.
Let’s run our own race. If we keep making Fediverse great, the results will come. We are but a tadpole in the big internet lake.
reddit is some 500x bigger than all of lemmy, you won’t see much
Doing quick testing it looks like Lemmy instances do get indexed by Google, they just aren’t ranked too high at the moment. Over time that should change.
I’m curious how that would work out e.g. would bigger Lemmy instances get ranked higher in search engine results?