One thing Reddit dominates on is search results. I’m looking things up and seeing so many links to reddit, which I guess is going to help keep that place relevant (unless those subreddits stay dark).
I wondered how Lemmy and this fed thingy stuff all works for that? With more posts can we expect to see people arriving through search results?
There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the
X-Robots-Tag
response header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.
So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.
Easily the best answer here, I think the people who think it will work “just like Reddit” are unfamiliar with federation still, and aren’t used to thinking things through in those terms.
Not to mention that Google results in general have been pretty trash for a couple years now. I don’t expect fediverse content to be prominent for some time unless there is a dedicated service that indexes everything.
Great answer, thanks.
I’m not hugely familiar with SEO, but I seem to remember there could be a penalty applied to content that is duplicated as it’s seen as spammy. I might be wrong on how this works though, and it could be based around only content pasted within a single domain.
I just wonder how search engines will deal with seeing the same content across a lot of instances in terms of ranking and noise.
Your “off-topic” sounded pretty cool to me! I love that that is something anyone can do when hosting a lemmy instance. You get to choose if it’s searchable on the web! Obviously there are search engines which ignore the no scraping/indexing header, but the rest of what you did should counteract that, noice.
Yeah, if you’re running something yourself, you can do pretty much whatever you want in order to protect it. Especially if it’s behind a reverse proxy. Firewalls are great for protecting ports, but reverse proxies can be their own form of protection, and I don’t think a lot of people associate them with “protection” so much. Why expose paths (unauthenticated) that don’t need to be? For instance, in my case with my Lemmy instance, all any other instance needs is access to the
/api
path which I leave open. And all the other paths are behind basic authentication which I can access, so I can still use the Lemmy web interface on my own instance if I want to. But if I don’t want others browsing to my instance to see what communities have been added, or I don’t want to give someone an easy glance into what comments or posts my profile has made across all instances (for a little more privacy), then I can simply hide that behind the curtain without losing any functionality.It’s easy to think of these things when you have relevant experience with web development, debugging web applications, full stack development, and subject matter knowledge in related areas, if you have a tendency to approach things with a security-oriented mindset. I’m not trying to sound arrogant, but honestly my professional experience has a lot to do with how my personal habits have formed around my hobbies. So I have a tendency to take things as far as I can with everything that I know, and stuff like this is the result lol. Might be totally unnecessary without much actual value, but it errs on the side of “a little more secure”, and why not, if it’s fun?
I’d be interested in how you did this, this seems like one of the best ways I’ve seen for securing a lemmy instance.
One easy way to do that is to set up something like Nginx as a reverse proxy in front and forward
/api
clean, but forward everything else with basic auth.The steps broadly would be:
- Set up an Nginx instance
- Set up a block in Nginx to proxy
/
to your Lemmy instance - Set up basic auth on that block
- Set up a smaller block that will only proxy calls to
/api
and other endpoints you want public, like previously with/
- Make your Lemmy instance unreachable from the broader internet, eg. if you’re on a single server, make it listen on 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0, but make sure Nginx can still reach it
And you’re done.
My guess is just that Reddit happily lets search engines crawl it, so that content is well-indexed, and because Reddit threads are often linked to from elsewhere the site is considered good quality.
I’d imagine Lemmy would eventually get to the same point naturally if enough information is shared here. At least, assuming it doesn’t block search engines.
Hmm although I don’t really understand how federation will fit with that, given it basically means the same content is duplicated on a bunch of domains.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google currently penalizes links that don’t end in the common top domains like “.com”, “.org” and similar. So something like lemmy.world, if indexed, will rank lower than a site ending in .com with the same keyword density.
Google went from being the most important website on the internet to being more and more useless, it’s amazing seeing such a massive company go downhill. But they have so much money that they’ll be able to stay big forever from capital alone.
What do you use as a search engine instead of Google? I feel like I’ve tried everything, but always end up back at Google search.
Been using Ecosia and so far its been very good. I did not have a need to use Google once.
I imagine it’ll take a while for fediverse stuff to be high up on search results but it should still work and appear the same way as reddit posts do, just using the federated domains instead of all only being on one site. Hopefully people do start arriving for that reason though!
Unfortunately Lemmy isn’t great for SEO because lemmy-ui heavily relies on JavaScript to render the page, which search bots avoid.
I usually don’t see lemmy on search engines, sadly.
Would be cool to have a browser extension that can return searched terms from fediverse sources that you choose.
I guess you’d have to try it out, right? Maybe look up some topics and point Google to Lemmy. Honestly haven’t looked much into the whole community beyond setting up a Mastodon account a while back and looking into it a bit more this week.
A lot of search engines rely on backlinks to rank the reliablitly/validity of a site so even if a given instance was picked up to have enough places reference it to be seen as a valid source would ve a pretty heavy lift.
I would love to know more about this on a technical level.
I would expect Lemmy to show up equally in the search results if there is enough relevant content. My tiny tiny instance is already showing up in search results, crawlers can definitely find stuff on here. It would be great if at some point we can append “lemmy” to search queries to get the good stuff like we could with Reddit.
I actually added a custom search engine to Firefox… so I can search something on Lemmy. I have the keyword ‘LW’ for Lemmy.World search right now (because Lemmy.ml was offline a while).
Basically, do the Lemmy search (search term
ssss
) then edit/replacessss
>%s
and copy the entire link.https://lemmy.world/search/q/%s/type/All/sort/TopAll/listing_type/All/community_id/0/creator_id/0/page/1
Then using ‘add custom search engine’ extension on Firefox, you add it.