The fediverse looks like a spam ring to search engines (websites all linking to each other to make them look more important, while on the other hand having a lot of similar/identical information, as if someone copy-pasted someone else’s website for content).
I don’t expect any fediverse website to reach the same position Reddit does, for technical reasons alone.
Having more content would help, but mostly for the main sites hosting big communities I would think.
I think Lemmy does set the canonical URLs correctly, always linking to the origin instance as canonical so it should see it as multiple ways to get to the same content.
Ultimately Google should figure it out if done correctly. But the problem remains that the userbase is tiny compared to Reddit, and mostly focused on the same relatively niche topics in the first place so it’s just not gonna rank very high unless you search for Linux stuff.
Lemmy has little links (like these:
) that connect every comment and post to their source in a user-friendly method. That makes a comment thread look similar to a link farm. Lemmy isn’t alone in this, other Fediverse tools do the same.
I also agree that there’s not enough content. That’s a separate issue. However, I think the technical limitation will have a proportionally larger impact on searchability than the lack of content in many communities.
Perhaps telling search engines not to follow comment links back will help prevent the technical side of the problem, but go too far and you’ll probably end up looking like one of those StackOverflow repost spam sites.
Lemmy has little links (like these:
) that connect every comment and post to their source in a user-friendly method. That makes a comment thread look similar to a link farm. Lemmy isn’t alone in this, other Fediverse tools do the same.
Yeah, and that’s what the canonical tags address: “hey I’m just a copy, my original location is Y”. It’s properly attributing the source of the data and should make search engines not mark it as duplicate content as a result. There’s also tags to mark links as nofollow for indexing that should help with not looking like link farms either.
That should also mean only local content will count as content so that brings its own set of problems where small instances will never rank along the bigger ones.
The fediverse looks like a spam ring to search engines (websites all linking to each other to make them look more important, while on the other hand having a lot of similar/identical information, as if someone copy-pasted someone else’s website for content).
I don’t expect any fediverse website to reach the same position Reddit does, for technical reasons alone.
Having more content would help, but mostly for the main sites hosting big communities I would think.
I think Lemmy does set the canonical URLs correctly, always linking to the origin instance as canonical so it should see it as multiple ways to get to the same content.
Ultimately Google should figure it out if done correctly. But the problem remains that the userbase is tiny compared to Reddit, and mostly focused on the same relatively niche topics in the first place so it’s just not gonna rank very high unless you search for Linux stuff.
Lemmy has little links (like these:
) that connect every comment and post to their source in a user-friendly method. That makes a comment thread look similar to a link farm. Lemmy isn’t alone in this, other Fediverse tools do the same.
I also agree that there’s not enough content. That’s a separate issue. However, I think the technical limitation will have a proportionally larger impact on searchability than the lack of content in many communities.
Perhaps telling search engines not to follow comment links back will help prevent the technical side of the problem, but go too far and you’ll probably end up looking like one of those StackOverflow repost spam sites.
Yeah, and that’s what the canonical tags address: “hey I’m just a copy, my original location is Y”. It’s properly attributing the source of the data and should make search engines not mark it as duplicate content as a result. There’s also tags to mark links as nofollow for indexing that should help with not looking like link farms either.
That should also mean only local content will count as content so that brings its own set of problems where small instances will never rank along the bigger ones.
Does that still get registered that way if identical links/posts are cross posted instead of duplicated?
I regularly see duplicate rather than cross post, which is a shame.