1 yr. ago • 90%

Can Lemmy posts be indexed by Google or other search engines?

One of the best things about reddit was looking for answers or other users with the same problem as you, and since Google didn't really help with that anymore and instead insisted on giving you business results, the best practice was to put your search terms in followed by 'reddit' and you'd find your answer.

17 comments

I'm working on a specialized search engine just for the fediverse. https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

If anyone wants to help out, feel free to reach out, but I hope to have something ready to release soon.

The idea with my version is that it'll search as much of Lemmy / the fediverse as it can and you can select the preferred instance that you want to open any link with.

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- If you are looking to return relevant, well ranked results based on freeform queries you'd be better indexing into something like elasticsearch. Otherwise you'll be reinventing solutions to well understood problems, like stemming as a very basic example.
  
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- I’ve been testing this and it’s the real deal!
  
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- Permanently Deleted
  
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  Best one I heard so far has just been "Lemmy Search" or "Let me Search".
  
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  x2 on findmmy
  
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I’ve been experimenting with my instance and google does index my lemmy.mitchday.com page. If you search ‘lemmy mitch day’, you get my page right up top and a few motorhead fans named mitch down below.

My experiment involves trying to SEO a vanity domain I’ve had for years and only used for email. Since July 4, the page ranking for my general site has steadily climbed. The little bit of traffic from other instances and a handful of subscriptions seems to be impacting the ranking.

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Does fediverse instances even show up in search engines?

There is no money for parasites here so I wouldn't expect them to send anyone here.

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- They can. For Mastodon there's an option for "Opt-out of search engine indexing" which adds a "noindex" tag to your profile which Google respects. Not all indexers respect the tag however and "noindex" data isn't federated which can cause your replies to show up: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22047
  
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They're getting indexed, but search rankings are so low they're buried. If you put <search term> site:<server> you get post results. For example lemmy site:lemmy.world

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Yes, but Google annoyingly "corrects" every feddit.* searchterm to reddit

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- Why are people using a site named after the place they purposefully left with just one letter changed?
  
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  Presumably because reddit itself has a lot of positivity and memories attached to it for a lot of people - it wasn't the site that people wanted to leave, but rather the ceo and staff behind it.
  
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I recently saw that someone was making a keyword search engine that works across the fediverse. I'll try to find the project.

edit: found it, unsurprisingly it's called lemmy-search. Although it only seems to work on Lemmy instances.

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- That's cool, but OP is specifically asking about finding things on Google.
  
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  "...or other search engines?"
  
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