# AI Taught Me GitHub SEO. Then I Submitted 42 Pull Requests. > Source: > Published: 2026-07-31 00:22:24+00:00 A few months ago, I wrote about [how AI taught me to use GitHub](https://ordinarymantrying.com/ai-taught-me-github-backlinks/) when Reddit banned me and Twitter ignored me. That post ended with me having three repositories and six backlinks. It felt like a win. Then AI told me there was another layer. ### What Are Awesome Lists If you’ve spent time on GitHub, you’ve probably seen them. A repository called something like “Awesome Psychology” or “Awesome China Travel.” A long README file. Hundreds of curated links, organized by category, maintained by someone who cares about the topic. These lists exist for almost everything: finance, mental health, language learning, cognitive biases, travel, quantitative trading, AI tools, parenting. Here’s what I didn’t know: anyone can submit a pull request to add something to these lists. A pull request is a proposal. You’re saying — here’s a change I’d like you to consider. The maintainer accepts it, rejects it, or ignores it. If they accept it, your link gets added permanently. A real backlink, from a real GitHub repository, pointing to your site. AI explained this to me in about three minutes. I had spent months not knowing this existed. ### The First Batch: 29 Pull Requests I had tools that fit different categories. [Wander China](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/wander-china/index.html) — a drag-and-drop trip planner for 31 Chinese cities. [Mind Traps](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/mind-traps.html) — a quiz about 40 psychology laws and cognitive biases. [AI Invest OS](https://ordinarymantrying.com/tools/ai-invest-os.html) — a free investing toolkit I built from seven months of real experiments. AI helped me search GitHub for relevant Awesome Lists, fork each one, make the edit, and open a pull request. Over two weeks, I submitted 29 pull requests — psychology lists, finance lists, travel lists, AI tool lists, cognitive science lists. Then I waited. ### What “Failed” Actually Means When I checked back, I saw a mix of states: MERGED, CLOSED, OPEN. My first reaction was that a lot had failed. My second reaction, after counting properly: only one had been rejected at that point. CLOSED means the maintainer saw it and said no. That’s a real rejection. OPEN means no one has responded yet. Not a failure — a waiting room. Out of 29: 1 merged, 1 closed, 27 still open. Two months later, that number shifted. Today the full picture is: **Merged (confirmed backlinks): 2**—[AI4Finance-Foundation/Awesome_AI4Finance](https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/Awesome_AI4Finance/pull/20)and[coder1296/awesome-travel-discovery](https://github.com/coder1296/awesome-travel-discovery/pull/2)**Closed (rejected): 9****Open (pending): 31** The 31 open PRs are still alive. Maintainers review on their own timeline — sometimes days, sometimes months. ### The Maintainer Who Rejected Five in a Row Nine rejections sounds like a lot. But when I looked carefully, five of them came from the same person. A GitHub user named brandonhimpfen maintains five travel-related Awesome Lists: awesome-travel, awesome-travel-blogging, awesome-travel-hacking, awesome-solo-traveler, awesome-digital-nomads. I submitted Wander China to all five. He closed all five — no comment, no explanation. Five rejections from one person is not five failures. It’s one opinion, repeated five times. I added brandonhimpfen to a list of repos I won’t submit to again. Then I moved on. ### 5 GitHub SEO Techniques (Awesome Lists Are Just the Start) While reviewing the pull request situation, AI pointed out four more techniques I had completely missed. Here is the full list. #### 1. Submit to Awesome Lists (what we just covered) Fork a relevant Awesome List, add your tool, open a pull request. If accepted: permanent backlink from a trusted domain. If rejected: ten minutes lost. The asymmetry is worth it. #### 2. Create Your Own Awesome List Instead of only submitting to other people’s lists, you can create your own. A repository called “awesome-china-travel” or “awesome-psychology-tools” — curated by you, your tool listed first. The advantage: no one can reject you. You control the list. If people find it useful, they link to it — and to everything in it, including your tools. I already have [awesome-china-travel](https://github.com/daligao/awesome-china-travel) and [psychology-laws-awesome](https://github.com/daligao/psychology-laws-awesome) on GitHub for this reason. #### 3. Reply to Issues in Other Repos When someone opens an issue asking for a tool recommendation — “does anyone know a free trip planner for China?” or “what’s a good cognitive bias quiz?” — you can reply with a genuine suggestion. Your tool, if it fits. This is not spam. It’s answering a real question. The link you leave in the comment becomes a backlink. And because it’s in a thread where someone actively asked for exactly this, it’s also genuinely useful. #### 4. Add Topics to Your Repositories Every GitHub repository can have up to 20 keyword tags — things like “china-travel” or “cognitive-bias” or “free-tools.” These determine whether your repo surfaces when someone browses GitHub by topic. My four main repos — [wander-china](https://github.com/daligao/wander-china), [ai-invest-os](https://github.com/daligao/ai-invest-os), [mind-traps](https://github.com/daligao/mind-traps), and [psychology-laws-awesome](https://github.com/daligao/psychology-laws-awesome) — had zero topics between them. Zero. I added eight to each today. It took about five minutes total. #### 5. Update Your GitHub Profile README GitHub lets you create a special repository — named exactly after your username — that displays as your public profile page. Whatever you put in the README shows up when anyone visits your GitHub profile. I had a profile at [github.com/daligao](https://github.com/daligao). It had simulators, flashcard tools, quiz tools — but Wander China and AI Invest OS were completely absent. I added them today. Every item in that profile is a link pointing somewhere. Search engines see all of it. None of the above required any coding. The whole afternoon cost zero dollars. ### The Numbers | Total pull requests submitted | 42 | | Confirmed backlinks (merged) | 2 | | Rejected | 9 | | Pending | 31 | | Repos with topics added today | 4 (from 0 to 8 each) | Two confirmed backlinks from high-authority repositories. 31 more pending. ### What This Means If You Have a Blog Most bloggers have never heard of Awesome Lists. Most GitHub users have never thought of it as an SEO channel. The two groups rarely overlap. That gap is the opportunity. You need something worth linking to — a tool, a resource, a quiz, a curated list. Then you find the Awesome Lists that match your topic, fork the repo, add one line, and submit. If it gets accepted, you have a permanent backlink from a trusted domain. If it gets rejected, you’ve lost ten minutes. The strategy isn’t new. It isn’t secret. It’s just unfamiliar to most people who write online. And unfamiliar is enough to make something rare. *This is part of my building in public diary. I write about what I actually try, including what doesn’t work.*