4 ms·

A Very good SEO move, to stir some of the 'lab' traffic away from gitlab.

spectramax 7y ago
That's an interesting viewpoint. To be honest, I don't understand SEO and it is such a big buzz word. If I look up videos on YouTube about SEO, they appear as if they're selling me a pyramid scheme. Why is the SEO business appear to be so scammy? I am put off from just learning about it. Same thing with SEO books on Amazon.
- sv123 7y ago
  All you need to know about SEO: Create good content that people want to link to, make sure you follow html best practices that have been around since the 90s.
  - sb52191 7y ago
    As someone with very minimal/hobby experience in html, do you have an example/link as to what those practices are?
  - matz1 7y ago
    Its not enough because you are competing with other for the same spot. You have to do all of you mentioned + something more that is better than other.
    - prepend 7y ago
      I’m not sure. It’s been pretty good for what I need it for, running small businesses. I’m constantly bombarded by SEO spam to SEO my wife’s site. She just writes content, frequently and have genuine activity and ranks higher than all her competitors who SEO like crazy, but whose sites are vapid. Granted, would likely get more traffic with SEO, but it’s better, I think, to put energy into real, useful pages. Rather than trying to trick users or outtrick other sites.
      - matz1 7y ago
        Having good content is important part of seo.
- skytreader 7y ago
  As someone who spent more or less a year doing "growth hacking", heck yeah SEO is one big hairball. I understand the reason though. It's basically an arms race between the search engines (or just the Big G) and those who "game" the system, especially with ill intent in mind. At the surface, SEO is "easy": just build up links, links, and links. But when you're not hitting your projections, it gets difficult (at least for me, as a software engineer) to drill down on what part of your strategy is holding you back, isn't giving the intended ROI. A curious thing I learned during my time doing SEO is how there's an industry built on, basically, interpreting the whims of Google's algorithm, trying to shed light what part of your strategy can be improved. Might be common knowledge to others, but definitely not to me. But I don't buy that this leeches SEO away from GitLab. AFAIK, URLs are no longer as weighty to the algorithms as they used to be. At most this would leech off on GitLab's brand; maybe some GitLab fans would think GitLab released something new and then they realize they gave their eyeballs to a _GitHub_ product. This could fool humans, but not the algorithms.
- drusepth 7y ago
  It appears scammy because in 99% of the cases you hear about or see, it is. There are plenty of people doing things "legitimately", but they aren't the ones selling SEO services or writing books about it. Think about all SEO actually is: optimizing your content to make it easier to search engines to get it into the right hands (your readers/users/whatever). In the most basic sense, this often equates to providing accurate metadata to the search engine so it can better understand what it's indexing, so it (not you) can make the decision on who to share those links with. This very quickly turns into a game of "well, if I just add this extra keyword, I'll show up in more results". And then you add this extra keyword, then that one, then you start creating entire landing pages to rank on specific keywords just so you rank a little higher than competitors, and then you start looking up other tactics and moving your personal goalpost for which ones are acceptable (see: not too shady). Soon the same people advertising SEO services to you are advertising them to your competitors, saying, "Well, they're doing something shady; what are you going to do to compete with that?" The shadiness normalizes into "the game" and everyone progresses more and more down the rabbithole of who's doing more to game the system so they can appear higher on search engines. If you're not scamming end-users yet, you're still scamming search engines. Even "white hat" SEO [1] has become pretty corrupted with grey-area tactics over the past 5-10 years. Stepping into current techniques now gives off the impression that it's all scammy pyramid schemes because, well, it pretty much is. [1] The fact that SEO is even separated into "white hat" SEO and "black hat" SEO (and "grey hat" SEO if you want to get edgy) is a good illustration of what's wrong about how SEO is seen and perceived.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    That was tremendously informative, thank you.
iamshs 7y ago
I doubt it will take away the pole position for anyone searching for Gitlab though. Right now for me, it is Gitlab main website, Twitter, Gitlab.com/Gitlab-com, Wiki etc. Let's see where this link ends up after a month.
asdkhadsj 7y ago
I'm excited for the upcoming GitLab Hub(tm), an open forum for GitLab users. (disclaimer: This is a joke)
- boleary-gl 7y ago
  Check out the new http://hub.gitlab.com http://hub.gitlab.com :smile:
  - diminish 7y ago
    Impressive backlink :)
SilasX 7y ago
Reminds me of the fan theory that Disney made a movie called Frozen to dominate the search results for "Walt Disney Frozen" and crowd out the results about his body being frozen.
fgonzag 7y ago
And yet, this thread is full of people talking about Gitlab rather than Github, so I don't really know how good of a move it was.

That's an interesting viewpoint. To be honest, I don't understand SEO and it is such a big buzz word. If I look up videos on YouTube about SEO, they appear as if they're selling me a pyramid scheme. Why is the SEO business appear to be so scammy? I am put off from just learning about it. Same thing with SEO books on Amazon.

sv123 7y ago
All you need to know about SEO: Create good content that people want to link to, make sure you follow html best practices that have been around since the 90s.
- sb52191 7y ago
  As someone with very minimal/hobby experience in html, do you have an example/link as to what those practices are?
- matz1 7y ago
  Its not enough because you are competing with other for the same spot. You have to do all of you mentioned + something more that is better than other.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I’m not sure. It’s been pretty good for what I need it for, running small businesses. I’m constantly bombarded by SEO spam to SEO my wife’s site. She just writes content, frequently and have genuine activity and ranks higher than all her competitors who SEO like crazy, but whose sites are vapid. Granted, would likely get more traffic with SEO, but it’s better, I think, to put energy into real, useful pages. Rather than trying to trick users or outtrick other sites.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Having good content is important part of seo.
skytreader 7y ago
As someone who spent more or less a year doing "growth hacking", heck yeah SEO is one big hairball. I understand the reason though. It's basically an arms race between the search engines (or just the Big G) and those who "game" the system, especially with ill intent in mind. At the surface, SEO is "easy": just build up links, links, and links. But when you're not hitting your projections, it gets difficult (at least for me, as a software engineer) to drill down on what part of your strategy is holding you back, isn't giving the intended ROI. A curious thing I learned during my time doing SEO is how there's an industry built on, basically, interpreting the whims of Google's algorithm, trying to shed light what part of your strategy can be improved. Might be common knowledge to others, but definitely not to me. But I don't buy that this leeches SEO away from GitLab. AFAIK, URLs are no longer as weighty to the algorithms as they used to be. At most this would leech off on GitLab's brand; maybe some GitLab fans would think GitLab released something new and then they realize they gave their eyeballs to a _GitHub_ product. This could fool humans, but not the algorithms.
drusepth 7y ago
It appears scammy because in 99% of the cases you hear about or see, it is. There are plenty of people doing things "legitimately", but they aren't the ones selling SEO services or writing books about it. Think about all SEO actually is: optimizing your content to make it easier to search engines to get it into the right hands (your readers/users/whatever). In the most basic sense, this often equates to providing accurate metadata to the search engine so it can better understand what it's indexing, so it (not you) can make the decision on who to share those links with. This very quickly turns into a game of "well, if I just add this extra keyword, I'll show up in more results". And then you add this extra keyword, then that one, then you start creating entire landing pages to rank on specific keywords just so you rank a little higher than competitors, and then you start looking up other tactics and moving your personal goalpost for which ones are acceptable (see: not too shady). Soon the same people advertising SEO services to you are advertising them to your competitors, saying, "Well, they're doing something shady; what are you going to do to compete with that?" The shadiness normalizes into "the game" and everyone progresses more and more down the rabbithole of who's doing more to game the system so they can appear higher on search engines. If you're not scamming end-users yet, you're still scamming search engines. Even "white hat" SEO [1] has become pretty corrupted with grey-area tactics over the past 5-10 years. Stepping into current techniques now gives off the impression that it's all scammy pyramid schemes because, well, it pretty much is. [1] The fact that SEO is even separated into "white hat" SEO and "black hat" SEO (and "grey hat" SEO if you want to get edgy) is a good illustration of what's wrong about how SEO is seen and perceived.
- spectramax 7y ago
  That was tremendously informative, thank you.

iamshs 7y ago

I doubt it will take away the pole position for anyone searching for Gitlab though. Right now for me, it is Gitlab main website, Twitter, Gitlab.com/Gitlab-com, Wiki etc. Let's see where this link ends up after a month.

asdkhadsj 7y ago

I'm excited for the upcoming GitLab Hub(tm), an open forum for GitLab users. (disclaimer: This is a joke)

boleary-gl 7y ago
Check out the new http://hub.gitlab.com http://hub.gitlab.com :smile:
- diminish 7y ago
  Impressive backlink :)

SilasX 7y ago

Reminds me of the fan theory that Disney made a movie called Frozen to dominate the search results for "Walt Disney Frozen" and crowd out the results about his body being frozen.

fgonzag 7y ago

And yet, this thread is full of people talking about Gitlab rather than Github, so I don't really know how good of a move it was.