I feel your pain and I’m hoping I can help! I’m making a web UI that aims to be easier to use than existing ones.

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.

I second this. I know SEO is a controversial term with Lemmy’s core audience, but being able to find posts through a search engine is pretty darn helpful. It’ll also help more people find their way to Lemmy, which will diversify the range of communities.

If you’re not sure where to start, Google’s free Search Console can give you insight into how your site ranks, how people are finding you and which factors are preventing instances from appearing in search.