So, as per images below, when you search for an Australian community associated with lemmy, lemmy.world is more likely to come up than Aussie Zone in all i've tried, bar Melbourne our most active community.
My question: Is this a problem we should consider intentional action to correct? And if so what could we do?
I wonder if claiming ownership in Google Search Console would help? It would probably flow onto other search engines.
Though we might get ranked down for effectively duplicating a larger more commonly accessed site (Lemmy.world) even if the content belongs here. This could be a thing for the Lemmy developers to look into, i.e. generating a robots.txt which blocks all federated communities
~~Should just be able to do it with one rule of
Disallow: /c/*@*, I think?~~I forgot that federated posts are just under
/post/*like local ones are. You'd have to block each federated post individually. Not sure if you can do that on each individual page? Certainly adding every federated post to the top-level robots.txt isn't feasible.Posts have a canonical reference to the originating instance, e.g. this post contains
<link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://aussie.zone/post/11962005">for me. This is a hint for search engines to ignore this post and instead index the original one instead. The same also already works for communities, this community containing<link data-inferno-helmet="true" rel="canonical" href="https://aussie.zone/c/meta">. Not sure if DDG is just ignoring this or there's another reason for it to show up multiple times.