Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
When launching a new site, it is commonly believed that Google places the site in a sandbox for a period after first indexing. During this period the site is indexed, but does not rank well in search results.
This is an automatic occurance, caused by the search algorithms trying to fight linking spam and abuse of other traditional SEO methods.
Over ten years ago there was big hype around outsourcing. It seemed like all the things that could be done half way around the world for a fraction of the cost would be. I did think of this and even bought and read an excellent book, My Job Went To India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book), from Chad Fowler.
As a web developer I did feel quite comfortable that the industry was too dynamic, quickly changing and "unspeccable" to be outsourced efficiently. In hindsight I was right, web development is still mostly done close to the client and it's still always chaos just hours before launch.
As silly as it sounds, there is even a rise of a Cult of Programming Artisans; supposedly hand crafting fine code and always searching for the elegant solution. Goddam hipsters.
But me? I don't feel as comfortable now as I did a decade ago.
Search Engines are a very significant factor in many businesses today. Many companies will fail or succeed depending on their ranking on Bing, DuckDuckGo or Google. This has understandably created a whole industry of Search Engine Optimisation around it. Money talks.
But it's worth noting that SEO, like programming, isn't a tangible good that you can own - it's free as in experience. You can get far in SEO with common sense and understanding that the nature of hypertext.
Your content needs to be good, trusted and accessible.