this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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SEO is an industry devoted to undermining search engines' ability to organically surface good content. Good content will still be surfaced on its own, just maybe not quite as quickly.
Will it, though? This all seems like untested theory, to be honest.
While SEO may have started as a means of manipulating search engines, search engines have grown to adopt to new SEO techniques and now use those techniques as part of their built-in ranking systems. Outside of content that goes truly "viral", I think it's pretty difficult to get anything new to the top of a Google search without some massive SEO these days. Especially considering the head start that bigger players have already gotten on their SEO game, and the sheer wealth of content that search engines have to parse through.
I think maybe if we were still in 2010's internet, that could be true. But search engines aren't the same as they were in the past. SEO is the new norm.
What if we wanted to reject and change the new norm, just as we rejected Reddit and Twitter and started the Fediverse?
The silent majority are never going to have the time to blow on shit that people who get so mentally invested in this stuff do.
That’s what people don’t seem to understand. The silent majority is not mindless by choice. They’re mindless by design.
So how do we reverse the trend? They didn't start out that way, like you said, it was designed. So how do we undermine those designs?
Become the president or head of Congress.
Revolution it is.
I used to do a lot of SEO and run AdWords campaigns for smaller businesses back in the early days and they were always the norm. If anything Google has been constantly tweaking its algorithm to make it harder for non-organic SEO.
Something as huge as Lemmy that grows organically doesn't even have to worry about SEO. The problem is that the Fediverse being so spread out is a nightmare for Google spiders to crawl and rank.
Isn't that exactly why we should put in some basic SEO?
The basics should already be there for any decent websites. There really isn't that much to do for internal stuff apart from having a logical site structure and naming convention, with neat codes and good UI. Keyword stuffing and other blackhat tricks stopped working ages ago.
Linking is as organic as it can get for something like Lemmy, as long as we keep generating content and mentioning it on other websites(e.g. other instances and Reddit).
I guess we could do our part by linking more and naming the anchors accurately and how we would actually Google them. Some examples:
Every time we do this we contribute in building backlinks for Lemmy, but from what I see we already ain't doing too bad! That password manager thread was just posted yesterday and already it's the first result I get when I googled "best password managers lemmy".
Not if you don't do basic SEO at least... Things like ensuring that pages have:
Plus the site should have a robots.txt and sitemap XML that's been submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.