I love the short URLs that Derek Sivers uses on his website .
If you’re human, you can easily fit them in your brain and share them with other people who will be able to remember them as well.
However, they suck for search engines. If you want SEO, then you need to use descriptive slugs in your URLs.
This got me to realize something — what’s good for search engines are usually bad for humans.
Another example is how search engines love long articles written by AI while humans hate them because they don’t provide real value.
The issue I have with the above is that humans (SEO experts) are working hard to adapt content that will please search engines when it should be the other around.
Search engines need to be optimized to show content that users want but content should not be optimized for search engines.
They should be able to parse the content and determine the quality without having to do any SEO. If the content is good, that should be enough SEO already.
It’s becoming harder to find good content using search engines these days and the only way to change that is by abolishing all kinds of SEO. Let the engineers at Google work harder to build a good search engine instead of having us work hard to effectively harm users.
© Michael Karamuth 2022