Would you please consider having only local post/community/users indexed by search engines? A lemmy.ml user complained that their username is first result on Google with lemmynsfw.com domain name. Also implementing this would decrease chance of duplicate content.

It can resolved with a simple noindex meta tag.

edit: This start bit is wrong; Lemmy does SSR so Javascript-free/spiders should see at least some comments.

Lemmy is currently pretty terrible at SEO, in large part because the comments don't load until the JS has run.

This isn't just a problem for search engines, it affect things like archive.org and offline reading. Earlier today I loaded a page from an instance that had dropped offline - while they had Cloudflare Always Online enabled, the page loaded without comments so it was almost useless.

I think it's a mistake to consider all the SEO-related concerns as irrelevant just because you don't care about Google, etc. Most of the things necessary for good SEO are just good practices, with benefits for all users, especially in the areas of accessibility and third-party tools.

Fair enough. I'm currently focused on creating my own Lemmy web UI, but later I might have room to submit some SEO-related PRs. While I'm not yet sure what needs to be done, instance owners can get tailored recommendations from Google. I have a hunch that Lemmy is currently being penalized for duplicate content, which we might be able to mitigate by adding `` to federated posts.

I'm fully with you on not wanting to cater to Google. On the other hand, if someone writes a helpful Lemmy post, I would like people who don't know Lemmy to be able to find it.

and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for,

This is one of the most true statements I've read in the past years. Internet search is unusable.

It's also all about to change as soon as Google drops the new generative search feature.