this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is indexable but will take time. Google has started indexing Lenny.world but doesn’t have that many pages yet.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Meanwhile DuckDuckGo/Bing has only indexed the home page and [email protected]. Lots from lemmy.ml though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Doesn't duck duck go just use bing?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

And doesn't bing just Google?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Google just asks Jeeves.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

We're all google on this blessed day!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No it finds new content by following links in existing content I believe.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I saw Googlebot showing up in the access logs of my personal instance the very first day I stood it up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

By looking at the access logs. Googlebot sends a user agent string so you can identify it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are <meta> HTML tags and <link rel=β€œcanonical” href=β€œhttps://example.com/sample-page/”> tags as well that point to the original copy of a page, if it is not implemented it would be super easy to, but I’m on my phone at the moment so I can’t see the source code

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Indeed, that's one solution that was brought up in the GitHub issues.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah if they set a meta canonical tag to the origin instance they would help that post rank.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

All posts and comments do have a link to the instance they were originated from. That's what that weird looking multicolour star is (the fediverse logo).

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s also low pagerank right now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder how will Google's algorithm treat lemmy in the future. Maybe the uncontrolled/federated nature of it will make google ignore it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It will probably treat the individual servers differently.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm of the opinion that Google should just federate with everything and index the fediverse so it can keep the original sources of everything.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I think its fully SEO compilant, regarding how its built

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I'm hoping so! Would also be a great way to introduce people to Lemmy!!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Hopefully as Google is now indexing lemmy.world, more people will see it while searching and come hang out.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah it's a hassle to have to create alt accounts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Honestly, I hope all of the Fediverse's instances get indexed!

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