There's a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it's gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without "Lemmy" in the name, some don't include "Lemmy" in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the X-Robots-Tag response header such that search engines that properly honor the header won't crawl or index content on my instance. I've actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can't browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.

Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.

So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.

One thing to keep in mind is that Google currently penalizes links that don't end in the common top domains like ".com", ".org" and similar. So something like lemmy.world, if indexed, will rank lower than a site ending in .com with the same keyword density.

There's an issue on GitHub about the topic https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1285

Unfortunately Lemmy isn't great for SEO because lemmy-ui heavily relies on JavaScript to render the page, which search bots avoid.

A lot of search engines rely on backlinks to rank the reliablitly/validity of a site so even if a given instance was picked up to have enough places reference it to be seen as a valid source would ve a pretty heavy lift.

I usually don't see lemmy on search engines, sadly.

One thing I'd love to see and would probably help quite a lot with searchability is to have blog and CMS software, instead of having dedicated comment system, integrate a "discuss on Fediverse" button.

It could bring up possible communities based on blogpost/article tags. And since Lemmy supports pingbacks the system would know about the discussion threads and it could even show few last posts from each.

To me it seems like win/win situation for all parties involved.

I actually added a custom search engine to Firefox... so I can search something on Lemmy. I have the keyword 'LW' for Lemmy.World search right now (because Lemmy.ml was offline a while).

Basically, do the Lemmy search (search term ssss) then edit/replace ssss > %s and copy the entire link. https://lemmy.world/search/q/%s/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1

Then using 'add custom search engine' extension on Firefox, you add it.