Is Lemmy Indexable?
Is Lemmy Indexable?
Like Reddit is? e.g. for Google, or Bing (shudders), you know. Search engines. One of the ways many people around the world interacted with Reddit was looking up solutions, discussions, or similar from a search engine and NOT on Reddit itself. Is that possible in this thread of the fediverse?
It is indexable but will take time. Google has started indexing Lemmy.world but doesn’t have that many pages yet.
Meanwhile DuckDuckGo/Bing has only indexed the home page and [email protected]. Lots from lemmy.ml though.
I saw Googlebot showing up in the access logs of my personal instance the very first day I stood it up.
How'd you check this?
By looking at the access logs. Googlebot sends a user agent string so you can identify it.
I can already find some stuff on lemmy if I search for it. It will take time for everything to be indexed but I think it will work ok eventually.
It's certainly archivable; all one must do is look at the 'robots.txt' (a file that websites use to let nice search engines know which pages they shouldn't index) associated with the domain to find out what it permits to be indexed. Lemmy.world's robots.txt only disallows pages associated with instance/account creation, user settings, and administrator/authorized interaction.
So everything relevant to how reddit appears on Google is possible for Lemmy, the only difference is that Lemmy's associated PageRank (and other ranking scores) are considerable lower than reddit's. This should change with time, especially when more niche and specialized communities take hold.
That's true, but aren't federated pages at a disadvantage since you can look at them from any instance thus decreasing the number of links to one specific post (which is how PageRank works)? Since then instead of one post on page 1 you'd have 10 from different instances on page 3. I'm thinking this could be fixed if all posts had a link to the post on the original instance, which is where the ranking scores would then be more likely to aggregate.
That's a good point, and I'm sure that would certainly be a problem with PageRank and similar ranking algorithms, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Google and other SEs have intelligently crafted a pre-processor that translates links like "kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/34817/Is-Lemmy-Indexable" to the Original-Instance-Link (OIL, lurking Google devs feel free to steal this acronym) "https://lemmy.world/post/189226" so that relevant algorithms properly reflect the 'true' ranking of the information itself rather than the particular instance's... instance of it.
OStatus and Pump.io have been around for a while so SEs may (should) have already identified this problem and addressed it unless they've decided it's not important, not in-line with how their rankings are intended to work, or simply not easily solvable in some cases like I previously assumed. As Bjarne Stroustrup would say, "If you think it's simple, then you have misunderstood the problem."
Yeah if they set a meta canonical tag to the origin instance they would help that post rank.
Yes it is!
I think its fully SEO compilant, regarding how its built
In good time I'm sure it will be easier to find by using the standard Google search. For those who used to use (site:reddit.com) as a reliable search query. Here is a Feddiverse alternative you can copy and paste, at least for now until Google searching the feddiverse gets easier.
Copy paste and then type your search
(site:kbin.social OR site:lemmy.world OR site:sh.itjust.works OR site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.ml OR site:lemmy.ca OR site:midwest.social OR site:lemmy.blahaj.zone)
I'm hoping so! Would also be a great way to introduce people to Lemmy!!
I found this post talking about it, it'll just take time for the fediverse (or is it threadiverse now?) to make it's way up the page rankings I guess.
Hopefully as Google is now indexing lemmy.world, more people will see it while searching and come hang out.
I wish it were easier to maintain anonymity with indexing. Like it's weird that you can easily find people's archive of TikTok comments on Google, but in the app you can't see them.
Likewise if there were a way for posting stuff without making it easy for malicious actors to look at your whole post history to piece together who you are.
Yeah, this is actually a big worry to me, on Reddit especially because I think it would be easy (if not easier) to find out info about me by the subreddits I was active in
But it's also nice to have stuff indexed in Google when looking up product reviews and technical issues, etc. - it's a double-edged sword.
Ideally it'd be possible to make some comments pseudonymous at least (so only instance admins, or possibly community moderators could see the real author).
There was extenstions that allowed you to click a button on someones name and see what subs they were active in at a glance. There was also websites you could put a username into that showed detailed history of how that user interacted with reddit. What they subed to, what times they were active, sentiment analysis on their comments etc.
Yeah it's a hassle to have to create alt accounts.
Honestly, I hope all of the Fediverse's instances get indexed!