Are long URLs bad for SEO?

Hi Friend,
The shorter the better. According to Backlinko, "Shorter URLs tend to rank better than long URLs." To prove this, they performed some extensive testing on one million Google search results. Here's a graph that shows how Google rankings decline as URL length gets longer.

In short, yes. Google's own head of webspam team has stated that the first 3-5 words in a URL are given more weight. Anything more than that — and anything with a bunch of words that are variants of the same word — will look like a spam to Google and your readers.