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

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.