Google's John Mueller said a website does not need to have 200,000 words to be considered authoritative. This comes after a Twitter thread said "You need around 200,000 words on your website to be considered authoritative by Google." John replied, "I don't know who made up that 200,000-word number, it's definitely not from Google."
Here are those tweets:
I think @JohnMu would disagree...
— Robi 🚀 (@robibuc) October 28, 2022
I don't know who made up that 200'000 word number, it's definitely not from Google.
— johnmu: nothing is permanent, use 302 always 💫 (@JohnMu) October 28, 2022
I took that spin the other way, when I wrote No, 30 Articles On Your Site Won't Make Your Site Authoritative in Google Search.
So no, a website doesn't need 30 articles on it or 200,000 words on it to be considered authoritative. In 2019, John said word count is not a ranking factor and in 2018 John said word count is not indicative of quality. Google won't penalize you for short articles and Google said short articles can rank well and then again in 2014 said short articles are not low quality. Google has been recently saying to avoid fluff leading some to believe Google may not rank fluff well in the future. In addition, word count is not a sign of thin or how helpful content is or is not.
In fact, Google even removed the referece to word count in the Search Console document recently.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
