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GitHub Learning Lab

lab.github.com

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Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#41

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

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.

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#42
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

As someone with very minimal/hobby experience in html, do you have an example/link as to what those practices are?

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#44
post #43
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#45
post #25

Serious question to any psychologists/sociologists lurking- why are women in engineering roles usually somewhat overweight?

We've banned both this and your other account.

Both accounts???????

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#47
post #44
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 th…

Having good content is important part of seo.

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acc…

That was tremendously informative, thank you.

Re: GitHub Learning Lab

#50
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middle-school tier politics, I like that.

Reminds of when google gave duck.com to duckduckgo for free.

Did they really give it away for free? I couldn't find any source for this information.
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