Due to the nature of the default robots.txt and the meta tags in Lemmy, search engines will index even non-local communities. This leads to results that are undesirable, such as unrelated/undesirable content being associated with your instance.
As of today, lemmy-ui does not allow hiding non-local (or any) communities from Google and other search engines. If you, like me, do not want your instance to be associated with other content, you can add a custom robots.txt and response headers to avoid indexing.
In nginx, simply add this:
# Disallow all search engines
location / {
...
add_header X-Robots-Tag noindex;
}
location = /robots.txt {
add_header Content-Type text/plain;
return 200 "User-agent: *\nDisallow: /\n";
}
Here’s a commit in my fork of the lemmy-ansible playbook. And here’s a corresponding issue I opened in lemmy-ui.
I hope this helps someone :-)
If you do this, I’d recommend excluding at least your most common communities. Google searching Reddit has been a great tool over the years, and improved discoverablity of the service as a whole. Especially for smaller communities.
Feels kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. Maybe just exclude NSFW communities (though, do those even exist here?)
I agree, you do you, but IMO if you want to host a lemmy instance (that’s not private), this is kind of part of the deal. If you host communities, you are literally opening yourself up like this.