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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think this rivalry should continue; playfully acknowledge what everyone observes to be true.
Sir Tim said cool urls never die; GitLab, your turn! https://hub.gitlab.com -- make it happen!
Edit: Your use-case; me. I migrated to your platform and, as an autodidact, would greatly appreciate a native resource of similar (IMproved) quality. Thank you.
I gotta say, the "installing" workflow is pretty opaque and confusing. Why do I need to both authorize GitHub _and_ install a GitHub app? If I elect to only authorize it for specific repos (instead of read/write access to all of my repos), why do I need to install it first for some empty project before GitHub can create the repo for the course I'm trying to access?
I was considering using Lab as an alternative to freecodecamp for my students but looks like a pass so far because it is not beginner friendly.
Once you get past the ickiness of Lab asking to be installed on ALL your repos there is still the issue of materials.
Let's take the intro-html course.
Should be nice and beginner friendly right?
The last instructions for the first issue are:
"
To help you get started, I have already created an index.html file for you on a branch called: add-index. All you need to do is create the pull request:
Create a pull request. You can either use this direct link, or go to the Code tab, click on New Pull Request, select base: master, and compare: add-index.
Add a descriptive title to your pull request, something like "Add the index.html file".
Add a descriptive body to your pull request.
Click Create pull request."
"
No links to what a pull request is nor a link to introductory github course.
No explanation on why base: master, and compare: add-index it might as well be PCLoadLetter to those new to github.
PS Plus the promised automatic pull request failed(probably because I changed the title of the repository)
This actually looks great for job candidate coding exercises. You can guide them through working out some problems, and validate each step with an Action. Neat!
Last couple of years have been really great for newcomers to any kind of tech really. Resources like this Learning Lab, freecodecamp, react.games etc. have really opened up a lot of avenues for anyone to learn how to code - no experience required!
I can only hope that this results in better developers entering the workforce few years from now.
