Hi, recently I thought about lemmy and came into the conclusion, that it lacks one thing to be a true competition for reddit and stackoverflow and that is the search engine and user visibility.
Let’s say I want to fix some issue on my computer. I type the question into the browser and what?.. first 3 links lead to reddit, stackoverflow some random website or eventually quora. If there was answer to my question on any lemmy instance, I’d be lucky if it was on any of the 3 first browser pages. Also the fact, that the links of lemmy instances look well… not so standard, doesen’t help.
I think the solution would be to create one “central” instance, which wouldn’t have any users, but instead would aggregate posts from technical forums of other isntances. It would greatly improve search engine visibility and provide centralized access to content without dropping the federation philosophy. It would also help creating a brand, as everyone instead of searching for answers on reddit etc. would just go to lemmyhelp.xyz and look there, knowing it’s somewhat trusted and official source. Also moderation on such site would be MUCH easier, than on reddit or SO.
What do you think?
Sounds to me like a search engine problem not something a new aggregating instance can help with.
Not sure I understand the issue with the URLs, but any decent search engine will give you more important information about the web page than the URL, so again, it seems to be a search engine problem.
Sounds to me you just lemmy to be mainstream and huge straight away. I personally have little expectation that searching for general information in a search engine is going to bring up lemmy pages. We are a fair way out from that, and an aggregator instance won’t change that.
What will help, in the mean time, is multi-communities that are easily shareable. Also sorting algos that surface smaller communities. Once that lands, and people start defining them for certain needs, I think the community ecosystem will get some stability and clarity and focus.
💯. The reason people are adding “reddit” to their google searches isn’t because Reddit is good, it’s because Google sucks. It has a de-facto monopoly and has no reason to combat SEO and make it’s search useful again.
Lemmy URLs suck, tbh. It’s just a post id. They should definitely offer speaking URLs at the very least, ideally cross-instance
I don’t know what a speaking URL is, but I generally agree with you. It’s a problem with the fediverse on the whole. It seems like it’s a problem for the clients to solve, with maybe a useful additional URL resolver service that clients can easily use (supplementary services in the fediverse may be an area of future maturity for the fediverse IMO).
One wringle the fediverse creates, though, is that there is absolutely no guarantee that any link has a counterpart on your instance. There’s every chance that the underlying post, user or community is just not seen or subscribed to by your instance, in which case it doesn’t exist on your instance and there is nothing to point to other than the original URL.
A speaking url is human readable. How it is structured can vary (eg. /year/month/date/my-title-is-here).
Currently it is a post I’d (eg. /post/17659).
Human readable is better for SEO.
Human readable is better for SEO.
What … a search engine can’t scrape the contents behind a URL?!
It can, but afaik the url is one of the many parameters. And with an “id” syntax you “score 0” for that parameter.
Yea … just checked and both Twitter and Reddit are using IDs, though Reddit also has a title in the URL for a post, which I’m guessing means you can’t edit the title of a Reddit post (which is actually shit if true).
TBH, SEO seems to be silly big corporate bootlicking or knee bending at this point. Especially being so worried trying to please the search engines to this extent. Search engines are shit today, and they’re fully capable of indexing lemmy if they wanted to. I’m with Devs (see their AMA), SEO isn’t a priority and shouldn’t be.
You are correct: you can’t edit the title of Reddit posts.
Just FYI, there is this !fediverse@lemmy.ml when we usually discuss this kind of topics
I have a strong feeling against this. I don’t think one instance must be overpowered against others. We are created equal. If the instance has one user or 10.000, we all have a power in the fediverse. A super instance will kill that. It is the search engines problem, not ours.
Here’s the thing: use lemmyverse.net to find the right communities, enter them, and then locally search for your question. Profit.
There should be no central brand. That goes against the ethical guidelines of lemmy and federated social media. This is not about getting the most views and selling ads. This is about communities of people naturally coming together for the purpose of sharing information, not adiction.
There’s also this project https://www.search-lemmy.com/
You’d have to SEO every post you want to have show up on Google. Until Lemmy gets a good rep like Reddit, it won’t be favored in search results.
That’s an SEO problem. When I search stuff, I still pretty frequently get linked to obscure form website threads or small websites. No reason Lemmy threads can’t be the same.
It would be nice if search engines treated Lemmy as one big site instead of 100,000 little sites. That would increase rankings and make things easier to find.
SEO is the root of all of the web’s evils
Reddit is/was great, to search a term in Google with your problem/need of advice, and you had a great lecture of people’s opinions that had a similar situation as yours. Sure, there could be paid bots or options about some products, but it was a great start to make your own point of view instead of going through dozens of useless bot-written websites being promoted at top of the search results.
To be absolutely honest I like Lemmy as it is right now. If it popped up in popular search engines it would attract a more general audience which I have never experienced to be a good thing.
I suppose it’s a bit like those beautiful old towns where everyone knows each other, and then suddenly it shows up in search somewhere and suddenly you have all the touries ruining the place.
Also I like that every place is unique, and I wouldn’t mind it it became more so. Globalism and modern design has really done a number on turning everything monotone and oversimplified.
I don’t know a lot about running instances and the federation system but I think companies who operate search engines could create their own instances where they decide who to federate with and then use their instances to look for information. That shouldn’t be too difficult and they can create custom systems that suit them best. I don’t think it’s the users job to do that and until that happens the users of Lemmy should just focus on generating good content.
The ranking is determined by the number of links to a website, so the links will have to be edited so it will all link to the “big website”. also changing the link so it will be under your “home instance” might also cause problems (instead of X links you will have X/Y links where Y is the number of home instances).
That’s another reason to have some browser extension which will always redirect people to their home instance instead of putting the home instance in the link.
Not sure it is worth it.
