• cwagner@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Yes, but it’s not as easy as appending “lemmy”. Here, the content is spread over a wide number of URLs, and unlike reddit, they don’t rank super high in the results.

    But thanks to federation, search engines should eventually pick up most content, even when concentrating on just a few big instances. I’m guessing that eventually, you’ll be able to do a search with site:lemmy.ml and get most results (as with that many users, chances are high any other post has been copied via federation). Until then, you might need a more widespread search, I created a lens for kagi (paid search engine), that searches the biggest instances: kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, programming.dev

    The result is this:

    That does not work with site:lemmy.ml and would instead require site:lemmy.world on google.

    Caveat: Duplicate content detection might really throw things off. Normally, if two sites have the same content, but different URLs and no canonical html reference, then one will be detected as spam (or should be), I’m not sure how search engine indexing will be affected by this in the future.

    • Googleproof@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      That’s interesting that lemmy doesn’t generate canonicals. I would have thought that the original instance something is posted on would set the canonical, and other instances can point back to that - it really seems like this sort of problem is exactly what canonicals are made for. Does anyone know if there’s a reason for not using them (other than dev time, which is 100% a good reason)?