Today (I wrote this text on the 12th of September, 2023), I asked myself whether I am Google’s slave.
By this, I mean, am I writing solely to please Google’s algorithms and meet its SEO requirements, or am I writing for my own creative expression and the enjoyment of my readers? The XIX and XX century writers, with Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Marcel Proust, and Stanislaw Lem at the forefront, did not write to fulfill Google’s demands. Am I a writer? I do not know. Undoubtedly, I am a blogger. I wrote one post daily from July 2021 till the end of 2022. Since the beginning of 2023, I have written texts for more than 95% of days. I write about it because I want to stress I am a prolific blogger. Still, when I move my text into WordPress, the Yoast app gives me hints of how and what to change in my text to be “Google-friendly.”
I do it because I want my blog to be Google-friendly (thanks to doing it, more and more people should find my website while writing some phrases in the Google search bar).
However, this process sometimes makes me question whether I am compromising my creative integrity. No one told Dostoyevsky, Proust, or Lem how to edit their masterpieces. Google tells me how to write and change my text to increase my blog’s popularity. While analyzing all these things, I realized I needed to correct something. I should not write for Google but for other people. Even if the chances my blog will be prevalent decrease, I should not remain Google’s slave. Does it mean I do not feel free while writing? Luckily, no. Google hits rather technical aspects of my writing (e.g., sentence lengths).
Google does not censor me. Still, I should add my technical abilities, characteristics, and issues to my texts without Google’s help, even if my ratings would decrease.
The truth is that reading Marcel Proust’s “In Search Of Lost Time” book inspired me to write this text and to think about Google’s impact on my writings. In it, there are plenty of single complex sentences, difficult to follow, reaching more than half of a page, and I had to read twice or triple to understand them. Undoubtedly, Yoast SEO would recommend that Proust shorten these long sentences and split them into two or three sentences. I believe that there is a balance to be struck between writing for SEO and writing for personal expression, and I am constantly striving to find that balance.
