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?
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.
Maybe google downranks db0 instance like it does other pirate sites?
Some instances disabled crawling, namely lemmy.ca
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.comon 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.I honestly don’t think Google crawlers knows how to index the fediverse but I am kind of talking out of my ass rn.
Fediverse is just another website. It literally finds my username on many other instances posts got replicated to.