How come Lemmy rarely shows up in internet search results?
from countrypunk@slrpnk.net to fediverse@lemmy.world on 21 Jul 21:37
https://slrpnk.net/post/25010726
from countrypunk@slrpnk.net to fediverse@lemmy.world on 21 Jul 21:37
https://slrpnk.net/post/25010726
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?
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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.
I also noticed that when Lemmy links do appear it’s often to a random federated instance, not the original source.
no its all a big conspiracy
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. That’s probably a bit of an issue actually. The link is for lemmy.dbzer0.com for my user on midwest.social to a community on lemmy.world and I just linked to it from discuss.online. Those might each be ranked independently even though it’s the same content, vs all being ranked together if it’s all centralized on one site like Reddit. Not really that hard to adjust for, but if Google doesn’t care in the first place because they think they’ll get fewer ad impressions out of it then it won’t be changed.
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.
Woah, I use Kagi and I didn’t even know about this.
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.
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
Things you send to friends and family will not be indexed by Google, so that is somewhat useless for this purpose.
Sure but it creates tragic, and they might click around and subscribe, maybe search for it in the future.
It's a marathon not a sprint
On my flashlight review website, every article links to a corresponding post on !flashlight@lemmy.world and displays comments from there.
Nice website and idea 👌
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.
How come
Because nobody in the fediverse is going to waste money on SEO
Doesn't have to be money, but putting in some effort into basic SEO could drive more users here and away form Reddit etc.
Reddit drives enough of its own users away to make spending money on courting them a waste of time
Because Google is too busy sucking Reddit off to pay attention to Lemmy.
Pretty much, yeah. Incredibly.
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.
.
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 actually started to see some results from Lemmy.world in DuckDuckGo search results.
What kind of searches?
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
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.
…and you say that as if it’s a bad thing :)
Yes, it hurts discoverability. How can you have a community without people?
Yes, you need people. But I’d say Reddit has too many people. The Ethernal September problem: sometimes, small is better.
The thing with Reddit is that it got too big and political. It was open before but yet still fun a decade ago.
I’d like to ask it the other way around: How many people would it need until you’d say “Yep, that’s a community alright.”?
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.
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.