Submitted 8 months ago by countrypunk@slrpnk.net to fediverse@lemmy.world
I’m curious as to why Lemmy rarely shows up in search results on the main internet even if there is a post related to the search input. I’ve only ever seen a Lemmy result if Lemmy is specified. Is this because we’re still relatively small or some other reason?
From an SEO perspective, federation looks almost exactly the same as spam unfortunately. A bunch of websites with very similar content that all link to each other but aren’t linked to externally very much.
This person gets it! After I launched my website/blog it showed up immediately on google, even though it’s content is directly pulled from my Lemmy instance. Which has been running much longer than the site, and cannot be found using search engines.
…and you say that as if it’s a bad thing :)
Yes, it hurts discoverability. How can you have a community without people?
because the WWW is now so unimaginably big that something needs to show up on the first page, and except for very obscure search terms, that “something” will probably be more well-known pages that have invested more in SEO
I've actually started to see some results from Lemmy.world in DuckDuckGo search results.
What kind of searches?
I don't remember the exact search, but it had something to do with Star Citizen. A link to a post from that Lemmy.world community was fairly high on a DuckDuckGo search result.
Along with a few other users, I've posted some useful links and info in the community over there. It looks like that work is starting to pay off.
There’s just not enough content here besides tech and linux. Also, It’s likely about keeping the internet influence dynamics inside the silicon valley, which in part is favorable to authoritarian surveillance system like the US. And yes, they are in bed with each other if you haven’t noticed.
I’ve seen league of linux lemmy show up in search results but thats dead now so rip. Other than that we dont have that many answer style threads compared with the years and years of blogspam and reddit spam.
Is this because we’re still relatively small or some other reason?
Pretty much, yeah. Incredibly.
Because Google is too busy sucking Reddit off to pay attention to Lemmy.
How come
These days all I seem to get from search is regurgitated dog vomit AI written summaries.
Decided to pay for Kagi, and now Google results look even more ridiculous.
Not much links to it. It’s really rare that I see a blog, social media, or non-fediverse forum post link to a Lemmy post. That sort of thing still matters quite a bit to search engines.
Be the change you want to see, I've been sending links like https://piefed.social/post/1062918 to friends and family when I see interesting things or funny memes
Be the change you want to see
On my flashlight review website, every article links to a corresponding post on !flashlight@lemmy.world and displays comments from there.
Things you send to friends and family will not be indexed by Google, so that is somewhat useless for this purpose.
I’ve seen my own posts show up in specific search results based on the transcripts, which is nice to see. Tried searching for “Great Scott! The hatch is opening” on Google just now and it linked to my post at discuss.online/post/14315116
Kagi has a feature for specifically searching the fediverse. It’s a paid search engine, but IMO that ends up with their incentives aligned with mine.
Each fediverse instance is ranked separately that’s the biggest issue. Each specific post is ranked based on the instance of the community its from due to content origin links. So the same post isn’t ranked separately but each instance is only ranked based on the posts to its own communities.
Woah, I use Kagi and I didn’t even know about this.
Because that doesn’t make any money for Google/MS/Meta/Amazon etc.
...No. It's because Lemmy content and users are duplicated into hundreds of instances. Websites are ranked independently and because they're so split, none of them are popular enough to be on search engines. There are plenty of ad-free sites that show up on page one.
some speculate that because the content is the same across all these instances, Lemmy might be getting caught in the spam filter too.
no its all a big conspiracy
I also noticed that when Lemmy links do appear it’s often to a random federated instance, not the original source.
CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Depends on the search engine you use. I started giving Kagi a try and it has options to increase visibility of fediverse content in your searches.
I’d guess it’s a mix of Fediverse being a poor fit for ad-oriented SEO and relatively low adoption.