I'm working on a specialized search engine just for the fediverse. https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search

If anyone wants to help out, feel free to reach out, but I hope to have something ready to release soon.

The idea with my version is that it'll search as much of Lemmy / the fediverse as it can and you can select the preferred instance that you want to open any link with.

I recently saw that someone was making a keyword search engine that works across the fediverse. I'll try to find the project.

edit: found it, unsurprisingly it's called lemmy-search. Although it only seems to work on Lemmy instances.

They're getting indexed, but search rankings are so low they're buried. If you put <search term> site:<server> you get post results. For example lemmy site:lemmy.world

First we need to offer google competitive answers to reddits. Then it will consider indexing us.

Yes, but Google annoyingly "corrects" every feddit.* searchterm to reddit

This would obviously be good for promoting Lemmy which I’m 100% all for.

But from a privacy point of view, I also feel mods should be able to stop indexing or choose which engines can index for their specific communities and also users at a user should be able to control it. I understand that engines could ignore this, but I doubt the big ones would..

I think I read that individual instances already can choose whether to be indexed or not, I could be wrong there

Being decentralized will make it harder to just use "search + reddit" because you don't know if it's "search + lemmy.world" or "search + beehaw" or "search + kbin." Also, each admin is in charge of their own Robots.txt.

I’ve been experimenting with my instance and google does index my lemmy.mitchday.com page. If you search ‘lemmy mitch day’, you get my page right up top and a few motorhead fans named mitch down below.

My experiment involves trying to SEO a vanity domain I’ve had for years and only used for email. Since July 4, the page ranking for my general site has steadily climbed. The little bit of traffic from other instances and a handful of subscriptions seems to be impacting the ranking.

Does fediverse instances even show up in search engines?

There is no money for parasites here so I wouldn't expect them to send anyone here.