I met their CEO a couple years ago - seemed like a good guy. It always seemed to me like their new name is an SEO nightmare, though.
It looks like they've gotten a bit better. Now if they could only increase the contrast of their copy beyond 2.15, it might actually be readable.
I would bet more important though is their search and mind share. More people searching for chef that are actually searching for them.
I think the only way they got as far as they have is because of that search volume, not necessarily their content or the links to their content.
I am basing this on absolutely nothing, just theory ... curious what others think or know?
I wonder if my assumption about incognito search results being non-personalized is false.
Here in PEI, Canada, if I search Chef in incognito, they're #4 and the first 3 hits are for the movie Chef from 2014.
The SEO shouldn't actually be too tough because people are quite a bit more likely to link to Chef the company using the word "chef" than anything about cooking.
And hey, Google went with "Go" which is nearly impossible to SEO and it worked out.
Though they do have the benefit of being Google. A significantly smaller team might have had better success than the original Go!, but that's not saying much.
"So, where do you work?"
"Opscode"
"Oh, never heard of them what do they do?"
"Server configuration management"
"Oh, kinda like Chef or Puppet then?"
"Uhm, somewhat like that first one, yes..."
(Or just confusing Opscode and Opsworks, which was equally bad from a name recognition standpoint)