I don't care much about SEO

My posts are shorter because I like to go directly to the point. If I give some context, it is because I feel it adds something, else I will skip it. I don't count how many words I've written, and I'll never add some filling content to try to cover additional topics and be more appealing for SEO reasons. And I hate when I detect one of those artificially inflated articles, often skipping them even if there is some relevant information inside.

But not caring about SEO does not imply not applying good practices. I've seen now decades of slow but steady URL tweaks and changes, and I happily embraced ideas like removing format extensions or post dates; I feel sad when I click on a link and 404s, so I pass from time to time a little CLI crawler that checks for broken links in my sites (and I then manually go and fix all of them, often redirecting to archive.org); I try to describe things with my own words and provide my own code examples, but when needed I always cite the source of an excerpt. And when I think a post needs a minor update to reflect some relevant discovery, I go and check if a simple update is ok or if it's best to write a new article and reference the old one.

I think Search Engine Optimization is something that everybody in web development should learn a bit, but just "the good parts". I don't feel like almost blindly fighting against legions of skilled engineers building search engines. I'd instead produce engaging content on my own terms and rules, and let Google, Bing and others do whatever they want with it, as in ignoring or indexing, and how well/bad they rank it.

But you might think: why this sudden rant about the topic? The answer is the recent Yandex source code leak. Not judging the morality of the action itself, I read an article or two analyzing the source code (my favourite is the searchengineland.com analysis), because, from an engineering point of view, this is a unique opportunity: An inside view of how a vast and mature search engine works; a peek of how and where so many brilliant minds have put a lot of effort. The Holy Grail might still be Google, but it is still fascinating and revealing. I wish search engines were less opaque with their algorithms, but I also understand that if you reveal the whole formula, bad actors will abuse the system.

As I said, I give little attention to SEO, but I encourage you to read about the leak.