Notices by John Mueller (johnmu@mastodon.social)

An #seo question from the X-Twitter world: In the domain name, is the use of dash ( - ) recommended or not?

- It's fine
- Pick a domain name for your brand for the long run, don't just collect keywords (the common reason for dashes). Build out a domain.
- For SEO, dashes are very minimally better in URLs than underscores. Don't change your URLs for them tho. Don't use spaces, commas, colons, etc in URLs.
- Your domain name is never going to make or break your SEO.

@tokyo_0 @Gargron The UI is set to overwrite the other folks mentioned, I thought that was on purpose, perhaps to avoid annoying people with notifications once they've received it once?

@tokyo_0 For example, if you open this thread in an incognito window ( https://mastodon.social/@johnmu/109624277067784119 ) and use view-source, you'll see there's no "noindex" and your reply is there. As far as I can tell, you have the noindex option enabled, I don't.

@tokyo_0 This setting only applies to new top level posts that a person does -- all replies may be indexable regardless, depending on who you're replying too (and the UI does not show you where this is the case).

Also, the way robots.txt & robots meta tags are implemented here explicitly allows public, full-text search for all public content. Search engines follow those rules, and if there's something deemed useful, they will try to index it if it's annotated as being public.

@tokyo_0 No. If a page has a noindex meta tag, it won't be indexed. However, if your reply appears on a page that isn't noindexed, then yes, your reply can be indexed, regardless of your profile settings.

@tokyo_0 Yes, those protocols exist - my team recently standardized some of them as an RFC. And Mastodon implements some of them too. The problem is that as they're implemented now, public search is explicitly allowed. If this is not what's wanted, something needs to change.

I'd like to better understand the reluctance about full #search on #Mastodon. Is there an overview somewhere?

Working at Google on search, and with SEOs, I'm not used to folks publishing things publicly, and then not wanting them to be easily found. Is there something Google could be doing - in search or in the form of guidance - that would help keep folks comfortable, and still be useful?

@katzentratschen Thanks, very helpful!

One of the things I'm trying to understand better is why the general feeling is the content shouldn't be public to the world, and yet it is published as such.

To me, making that explicit (eg, a login-wall) would set clearer boundaries, but I realize I definitely don't know the whole history.

@mirabilos @oil Is there a technical mechanism that needs to be created to make it clearer how these are meant to be treated? How can search engines understand what you'd like to have happen better?

The story of Googlebot and the cats ...

#seo #googlebot #cats #comic #japanese

For more, there's https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works?hl=ja (in Japanese)