this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Any plans for improving SEO? One of Reddit’s biggest strengths was being able to get very relevant results with a simple internet search. In time can you see something similar for Lemmy, even with its decentralized nature? I really you for doing this, thank you for your time!
Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.
Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.
edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.
~~Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don't load until the JS has run.~~
~~This isn't just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.~~
I think it's a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don't care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.
Seconding this. In addition to the accessibility, etc benefits, just think about the sheer amount of traffic/users that came from people googling a completely unrelated topic and having reddit pop up. Those are users that might not have otherwise found the platform.
Lemmy-ui uses isomorphic rendering so comments do come loaded (just not all of them) on the first page you visit, no javascript needed. Did you mean it should serve all comments?
Hmm, I've just tested an that does seem to be the case, at least as far back as 0.17.4. Do you know when this was added? Or if it's something that can be disabled?
Looking into Cloudflare Always Online, it uses the Internet Archive's backup instead of keeping on itself which could explain me seeing zero comments (i.e. IA scraped the page after posting but before any comments). I can't figure out which page in my history was the post in question, so I can't be sure.
Sadly I dont know when it was added or if it can be turned off, Im not very familiar with it.