this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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Hopefully this kind of content is ok here. Up until recently, when I would be searching for some kind of technical info, the top (and best) results would usually all be Reddit posts. I was very pleasantly surprised to do that this time and find a Lemmy post instead!

...It did happen to be a post from me, so unfortunately didn't answer my question at all, but I still thought it was really neat and wanted to share. Has anyone else seen Lemmy stuff getting indexed and turning up in their search results?

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[–] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Huh did Google start indexing lemmy?

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Funnily enough my own instance has a such a bad SEO that when I searched up my username (to find out what is out there) I found all other instances my comments got copied to but not my own freaking instance.

Oh well. Yes Google does index instances but how well and often is another story.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But why? Part of why reddit became so useful was its ability to use it for searching. Even though I no longer visit reddit regularly anymore, I still use site:reddit.com on many of my google searches because it gets better results for opinion or explanation based topics. Similarly, I found tons of useful local info from my local city's subreddit. I can't say the same about the Lemmy community, which I only see if I explicitly remember to go to it because the sorting doesn't show small instances.

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I... don't know. Performance? Doesn't matter anyway, because it's all federated.

You can do site: lemmy.world and find lemmy.ca posts since they're federated.

[–] lemann@lemmy.one 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

appreciateUsefulInfoCallback(true, setVeryLoud);

[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Don't forget to nest your callback a few levels deep, that way it's easier to use.

[–] syzizeky@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds like a possibility.

[–] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I honestly don't think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

So I thought the biggest issue with Lemmy and Google's pagerank is that federated content looks a lot like that blogspam that just aggregates content from elsewhere.

Perhaps they're adapting things