this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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I was wondering if the nature of decentralization would negatively affect SEO, since people can access the same post from many different instance

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[โ€“] manned_meatball@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[โ€“] Dave_r@reddthat.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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...

[โ€“] manned_meatball@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[โ€“] Briskfall@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 ๐Ÿ˜” 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?

[โ€“] manned_meatball@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

How long does it usually take for google to index websites?

Anything between a couple of hours to more than a week, I don't think having a "real-time feed" through Google is important though. Other than world cup scores, their results were never about speed.

[โ€“] Bjoern_Tantau@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

The current version of the frontend is not doing that yet, though.

[โ€“] LilyIsWasHere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried searching for the title of this post verbatim and it isn't in google results period.

[โ€“] beardedrhino@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

That could just be because of lag between when the post is created and when the Google crawler finds/indexes the page

[โ€“] AndreTelevise@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] axorld@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry I didnt make the post very clear. I was referring to an individual posts when people search for a specific issue/discussion in Lemmy.