Reddit did not start getting indexed and commonly delivered in generic results for years and years and years. Don't hold your breath. Eventually, though, it'll happen. So long as we're still here and growing.
Years. Not days, weeks or months.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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Years? Fine I'll index it myself, with blackjack and hookers!
We’ve done out own Reddit, time to do our own search engine!!! /s
Reddit also has decades of back linking and other behaviours that increase its page rank.
Let’s run our own race. If we keep making Fediverse great, the results will come. We are but a tadpole in the big internet lake.
If you do a search for something like "selfhost site:Lemmy.*" then you get results so the boards are definitely getting indexed. The SEO just isn't there to make it what Google thinks is a better choice when compared to other sites. That may change as these sites get used more and more things are posted and discussed but I wouldn't be surprised if the Google algorithm weighs reddit posts higher than other sites simply because reddit has become such a great resource for things.
The problem with searching Lemmy, is that you can call your instance however you want, so it might not be 'lemmy.*'.
Take for exapmle sh.itjust.works. You need to search with site: for it, separately.
What about Lemmy instances which don't have an URL starting with "lemmy"? How will a typical Google user filter results if he's interested in all Lemmy instances? DuckDuckGo to the rescue? 👽
In theory one of the big instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml should be indexed and searchable using the site: tag, and their local caches of communities originating on other instances should be included. It might mean that Google returns multiple duplicate pages (one for each instance indexed) however, unless Google takes steps to reduce duplication. Time will tell I guess.
Reddit has orders of magnitude more content than Lemmy. Reddit also has better SEO. I don't think Google is purposely not showing Lemmy content, we just don't have enough content to show.
It’s simply a matter of time, on the matter of months and months and months to years.
Do we really want all that bs traffic though? The larger this place becomes, the worse (I fear) it’ll get.