Earlier this month, Google said it might remove the word count reference from the best practices for your article pages help document in the Search Console news errors page. Well, it did, it removed the whole section and error around "article too short."
As a reminder, Google Search Console previously has in its Google News specific article content error named "Article too short." In that section, it offers recommendation to "make sure your articles have more than 80 words." Google's Danny Sullivan said they may remove that reference because "people shouldn't be stressing about word count," he said on Twitter.
Here is what it looked like:
Google has now removed that section completely from the page and it looks like you should no longer see any "article too short" errors in your Search Console reports.
So no need to worry about having short articles as long as they answer the user's needs.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
