I haven't used Google in a while, DuckDuckGo indexes them okay, SearX too

As far as Reddit goes, recently there have been articles about SEO shenanigans

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-reddit-is-taking-over-google-right-now-2024-4

There was a guide a while back about searching for Lemmy posts, and it involved using the search operators to pick out a few large instances

I am quite happy to have a Google search phrase that brings up one of my posts: weaselverse darkest timeline. It's niche but still...

My understanding is that Lemmy's cross-posting between instances makes Google think they are just a "farm" of sites harvesting clicks and ad revenue. That will really impact their ranking or even if they get indexed at all.

I hope it's only a matter of time before Google adjust their algorithms to take account of the Fediverse but I am not holding my breath. I have pondered how to improve Lemmy's SEO but I am drawing a blank.

Based on a quick look, from the best to worse: DuckDuckGo > Google > Quant > Bing

Unless search engines decide to integrate a dedicated filter to Fediverse, it will always be hard to search even if it's indexed. Cross posts, quote posts are not search engine friendly features.

This is an old post, but I've only recently (I'd say a few months ago) started to see Google's indexing bots pop-up in my instance's server logs, so this may be about to change