They aren't behind any login or anything stopping it. So yah, I expect they're already are being indexed.
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I'm worried the Fediverse is going to be an SEO nightmare though.
That's a good point. The same content exists on multiple instances. I think Lemmy should set a canonical URL the HTML . The canonical URL of each post should point to the instance where a post originates from.
Seems like that is not implemented in Lemmy. Also checked Mastodon, and doesn't have a canonical tag either.
On browser, I see a little fediversee icon next to every post/comment that links to the canonical. I don't think traditional html search engines know how to index it, though. Probably better if we have our own lemmy search engine like browse.feddit.de
There is a similar topic on beehaw.
Yes, lemmy posts can be indexed and found, but there are disadvantages compared to big, centralized services. I just found some posts on ecosia page 3.
I'm not sure if posts from instances without 'lemmy' in their name would show up when somebody searches for "something lemmy".
Yes, actually it's already getting indexed. For example you can try searching for site:lemmy.ml on DDG or Google. Although it'll probably take a while before search engines will deem lemmy instances "popular enough" for posts to show up for regular search queries (assuming that'll even happen at all).