I was wondering if the nature of decentralization would negatively affect SEO, since people can access the same post from many different instance
I was wondering if the nature of decentralization would negatively affect SEO, since people can access the same post from many different instance
Oh, good point. Yes, probably? We can not simply assume search engines know that all of these point to the same content:
Or even worse, due to defederation, they may not all point to the exact same content.
Without further investment either from lemmy or the search engine’s side, they are probably seen as distinct sources, not aggregated. Which makes each individually less relevant and less likely to show up .
Also note none of the adresses above contain ‘lemmy’. How would users search for content on lemmy in these cases? Can’t do “technology site:lemmy”, or?
But I can say, lemmy content is visible. Haven’t seen it on the first page of ecosia yet, but on page 2 or 3.
Add to that, I’ll bet search engines that find identical content scattered across different sites rank it lower than content at just one site.
This is relatively simple to solve from a technology perspective. You just incorporate the canonical URL meta tag on federated sites that reference the source URL. It’d be trivial to implement, provided the authoritative URL is known.
Maybe you could use use site:lemmy.ml, because they federate with most instances, they’re likely to have most of lemmy’s content?