I’ve been operating 100% of my public presence for API Evangelist on Github for almost five years now. I really like the public layer of my world being static, but I also like the modularity that using Github repos for my projects have injected into my workflow. API Evangelist runs as almost 100 separate Github repositories, all using a common Jekyll template for the UI, making it look like you are always on the same API Evangelist website. Any website, application, data, or API begins as a Github repository in my world, and grows from there depending on how much energy I give a project during my daily work.
When I first started doing all of this, I worried a little bit about the search engine optimization of my public websites. From what I could tell in 2013, my sites ranked lower after the switch, but since I’m not in this for the numbers game, I shrugged it off. However, in 2017 the numbers look different, and some of the projects I’ve been cultivating on Github actually rank pretty high, even with minimal optimization on my part. This isn’t just the web front-end for my projects–I am also seeing the Github repositories themselves showing up pretty prominently in search engine results.
All of this is anecdotal. I haven’t done any official measurements or testing on the topic, I just don’t care enough to invest that amount of work in it all. I just have to note that in the last year I am seeing significant benefit for my SEO by running things on Github. When you bundle this with the search and discovery opportunities via Github, the benefits to running an API project on Github as much as possible makes sense. It is something I encourage all of my clients who are operating public APIs consider as part of their overall marketing, communications, and evangelism strategy.
I’ve been profiling all the possible ways that an API provider can use Github as part of operations for a number of years, but I think I will be reassessing all of this in light of the SEO benefits. Exploring the ways that you can increase the exposure of your public API operations using Github. I don’t think my usage of Github is the only reason behind my SEO domination when it comes to the world of APIs, but I am beginning to think it is playing a bigger role than I had expected. I’m publishing a new API for a client right now, where they have given me full control over publishing to the Github ecosystem, which is a perfect opportunity to rethink all of this, and begin to think a little more constructively about the SEO benefits of using Github for API operations.
