honestly we should have collectively realized way earlier that putting all the useful, readable, un-touched-by-SEO help content for basically every niche hobby fandom and ideology in the hands of one for-profit entity was not very wisdom-pilled of us

Reddit actions are tragic for the web. I can't even tell you how many times I searched something and typed Reddit at the end of the query. Not just because Reddit search SUCKS, but mostly because it's a gold mine of information. Especially for technical stuff.

Your game crash? Reddit. Weird bug on your laptop? Reddit. Looking for a cool app? Reddit. Have a weird question? Reddit.

Reddit saved me countless hours and headache. I felt that yesterday when doing a search about something without even putting Reddit on it, kept bringing up Reddit links. I'd click on it without reading and end up on a locked sub because of the blackout.

It sucks but I hope it's going to continue. But at the same time, I don't see Reddit backing down. And even lf they do? I'm not going back. Because how dare you? Like... screw you for even trying to pull that crap on your users.

Am I the only one that's noticed how reddit has been fucking with web crawlers? They insert newer comments into older posts so the crawlers pick up false results.

A few years back they started injecting a "related posts" box into pages. What that does is multiply the amount of results a crawler will pick up. But all those are false results. There's only one true search result which is the original comment/post. Some times I find myself sifting though the search engine results to find the actual original post. The rest are completely worthless, off topic, reddit posts littering the search index.

I know all this blackout stuff hurts now. I see it as necessary for the platform to lose its status as the "front page of the internet". Reddit turned evil a long time ago. It's long past time it be deposed of.

Had this happen today. Was searching for some programming related stuff and top pages are all inaccessible Reddit posts.

This also highlights the problem with a lot of communities moving to Discord, which inevitably ends up as repositories for critical information, but can't be indexed by Google. Reddit is still valuable as a problem solving resource, and I hope they fix this API fiasco.

People rely far too heavily on reddit for public resources. Here's hoping that changes now.

Before reddit removed them most of this compiled knowledge was in the subreddit wikis. I honestly believe a return to communities with wikis is the long term replacement.

Tacking "Reddit" onto search queries almost became a prerequisite. Never imagined I'd have to replace that with "-Reddit".

It's made researching a media centre setup very difficult this week...

Definitely saw this coming… can’t imagine what will happen if Stack Overflow pulls something similar. All WebDev/DevOps work will halt overnight.

I’ve been trying to put my issues/solutions in a personal blog or wiki, but there’s so much old info out there in sites like Reddit/SO/medium/etc, it’d be a huge loss when it goes away.

Google Search has been sucking for quite a long time.

"site:old.reddit.com" was just a temporary fix

For many people google (or whatever engine) was just a gateway to get informations on reddit. With all those sub reddits down at the moment, a lot of searches are really hard to get informations, because like it, or not, reddit is a big part of getting informations or opinions etc.

I mean if you do hit this, like I have. You can just use google's webcached view. or sometimes the internet archive.

I found this covers most of my needs: https://cachedview.com/

Ah yes, working as intended. It's probably affecting people more than reddit themselves. Hope the content draught continues though.

That’s why I used shreddit to delete all my posts and comments on Reddit. It’s not much, but if everyone does it Reddit will feel the repercussions. They won’t benefit from my content anymore.

This has been deeply frustrating, but since that's the whole point, I support this collective inconvenience.

I think it's more appropriate to say that internet searches in general had been getting worse over the last several years, but it just so happened to be the case that your answer could likely be found in a reddit thread.

So... How is Lemmy set for SEO?

I just add “forum” to the back of my search

I'm considering switching to Kagi because of this. Its results are impressive.

I've actively found this as well but honestly, I think it's for the best because most of the time Reddit posts with actual answers aren't well-cited. So if anyone asks how you know something, "uhh Reddit told me" is pretty weak. So Google is getting better because Reddit has gotten worse. It means that you have to go to the actual articles and find the actual sources instead of this daisy chain of information. We have a huge issue with misinformation and this actually helps resolve it.

You can prepend a link with "cache:" to view Google's cached version of the site. This works automatically with the url bar in at least Firefox and Chrome (likely other browsers as well). If your browser doesn't support that you can enter it in the google search bar and the result will be the cached version of the site (if available)

It is - but you can still access via archive.org and similar resources.

GOOD!

Wait until Google bots catch up and drop many of the links back to Reddit.

Are lemmy instances indexed properly as well? Would it be enough to put "lemmy" into the search