Each post refers to the poster’s home domain as the canonical URL, regardless of which instance you’re viewing it on specifically to avoid duplication SEO concerns
Comment on Lemmy posts are starting to pop up on search results for Google (+ other search engines)
Vub@lemmy.world 8 months agoExcept each instance has its own URL meaning ranking for ANYTHING is extremely hard since each domain’s rank will always be weak in the sea of others. Each is even being penalised by the algorithm if there are duplicate content mirrored between different URLs. It’s the weakness of the fediverse if we are to follow how search engines have worked in the last decades. Maybe it will lead to new search engines (I hope so) but right now it is not going to work well to replace for example Reddit … or rank well in general at all.
Ullallulloo@civilloquy.com 8 months ago
Vub@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Thanks, I didn’t know that and never bothered to look. But then you still have the (SEO) issue of all the domains vs one in the case of Reddit or Quora or Stack Overflow. But yeah, a few very large Lemmy instances will probably start to rank well once they have enough good content.
amju_wolf@pawb.social 8 months ago
Didn’t know that’s the case, that’s neat though it doesn’t solve the redirect back to your home instance.
It’ll also probably lead to centralization because if you’re more likely to find a particular instance through search and decide to join Lemmy you’re probably going to do so on that instance.
Lionel@endlesstalk.org 8 months ago
I wonder if there’s a way around this that we can create, instead of doing nothing or hoping google adapts.
Like a dummy instance that catalogues everything on all instances (but also links to the original posts) for the purpose of showing up on google search.
Since this instance isn’t for posting but for search engine indexing, there may be some otherwise undesirable micro-optimizations that can help improve its chances of showing up.
amju_wolf@pawb.social 8 months ago
Yes, this would be possible (and not too hard technically either). But all instances would have to agree to link this instance as canonical.
You’d also want to add a feature where you can set you home instance where this canonical instance would redirect you (perhaps even automatically). Home Assistant does something like that.
What pisses me most about Lemmy is that each instance has its own post IDs which means that crosslinking and switching instances based purely on URLs is impossible.
IMO posts should have random GUIDs for IDs; that would help a ton with these kinds of issues. It’d then be trivial for Google to detect same content (if they wish) this way
otter@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
At first I was thinking a GUID might be impossible because of federation, but a simple implementation might be the home instance’s post ID
So something like
Display lemmy.ca/c/cats/123444 for
lemmy.ca/post/123444Display lemmy.world/c/cats@lemmy.ca/1234444 for
lemmy.world/post/98736amju_wolf@pawb.social 8 months ago
The point of random GUIDs is that there are so many that it’s effectively impossible to generate duplicates just by random chance. They’d be perfect for this.
The initial instance picks it, and then the federated instances use it.
CommunityLinkFixer@lemmings.world [bot] 8 months ago
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !cats@lemmy.ca, !cats@lemmy.ca/1234444
density@kbin.social 8 months ago
bit.ly for lemmy
JohnWorks@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Would another option be like having every post have some kind of anchor of invisible text or something with “lemmy” so when I search for “best washing machine lemmy” it’ll show all posts across instances or something. Idk if that’s how SEO works entirely though.