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.
related news: Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts.
How long does it usually take for google to index websites? Because I tried the string lemmy site:lemmy.ml after:2023-06-15 and only one post turned up for me and it was Memes… the current state of affairs does not seem promising 😔 And if I tried with another instance with the same keywords lemmy site:kbin.social after:2023-06-15 nothing even turned up.
I wonder though, will search engines adapt to Lemmy and its fediverse system? Or will search engines die? Or will we see dedicated search engines to search through the fediverse?
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
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.
I tried searching for the title of this post verbatim and it isn’t in google results period.
Haven’t checked if they do this, but you can tell Google which one is supposed to be the “real” post. So you shouldn’t get duplicate content.
