question for #foss friends: how does Mastodon/Fediverse work with #SEO stuff? If a post were to go ‘viral’ one day on the platform, would it be searchable on Google?
It would be interested for servers to be able to somehow configure level of search-discoverability for a server; some might want to show up in search while others might prefer to stay mostly secluded.
@grant it's not perfect though:
- the numerous servers make finding profiles and links harder (than just one domain). This also makes it harder for them to collect "signals" (one strong site is often better than many small sites).
- the pages with posts have a lot of cruft (imo)
- the upcoming 4.0 release of #mastodon uses #javascript pages which makes indexing much harder and flakey with slow servers
@johnmu Oh wow, interesting — thanks for the info. So this next release might actually make it *harder* for pages on Mastodon instances to be indexed on search engines?
Also great point about the multiple domains making it tougher, I hadn't thought about it but that makes sense.
@grant
This reminds me of the early days of the Internet when #Usenet was the place where people shared their thoughts online. Like the Fediverse, Usenet was a network of servers exchanging posts between themselves.
One service called #DejaNews sprung up to index every post in every Usenet group with a world scope. This predated Google by a few years. DejaNews eventually was bought by Google
https://www.fastusenet.org/blog/what-is-dejanews-where-did-it-go.html
What was DejaNews? The question is what is DejaNews, but the question really is what was DejaNews. DejaNews began as a site that was dedicated to searching and participating in discussion groups found on Usenet. It later changed its name to Deja.com. This change was due in part to the change of focus from general […]
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