Why don’t Lemmy posts (from any instance) show up on search engines? Like if I try my hardest to get a thread to show up, virtually nothing from the actual instances in the fediverse comes up. I’m sure if I searched the exact url or something I could get it but it’s very noticable that the search engines by and large just kind of gloss over posts on here and I’m not sure why.
This stinks cause that was one of the biggest draws for reddit. So many times when you search some super obscure or specific question you’d get a few reddit threads with all sorts of information.
I’m sure it will be someday, but it’s so new, I don’t think the devs are focused on that right now. Mostly, I want them to focus on fixing the platform right now and making it better. Stuff like better mod tools, better local sorting and filtering, some better discoverability and searching features, universal @mentions, better ways to interface with other servers, etc. It will come in time, I’m sure. I think lemmy and activitypub as a whole weren’t quite ready for the reddit exodus.
It can take weeks for things to show up in a search engine and then it might not be ranked highly if it is. Right now Lemmy does show up in search results, you can see if you search for site:Lemmy.world, it’s just ranked low. Give it time and have more people post here and eventually things will show up closer to the top of google search results.
I see some Lemmy results quite fine. Google results need some time to be indexed.
It’ll take some time to settle everything up
Lemmy is not opimized for google. There is some consideration when you run a full-javascript app like Lemmy, and to the best of my knowledge, Lemmy didn’t follow their guideline.
If lemmy takes off, like Reddit, and has lots of content, google will adjust their algorithm to compensate and include it. Lemmy will likely focus on better SEO if it helps growth, but scaling and stability and usability are more important right now.
Guidelines are for little guys!
I say don’t let them crawl. I’d rather the server and bandwidth costs go to real people rather than bots