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We know Google has said numerous times that word count is not a ranking factor, nor is it indicative of quality. We know Google said short content can rank just fine and are not low quality. But Google has to answer this question often enough. John did that this morning in numerous tweets that I wanted to share with you.
Most recently, here is what John from Google said on Twitter:
Why would a search engine use word count as a metric?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
Not because of BERT:
That's not correct. If you're curious about how search engines could be using technologies like BERT, there are a lot of research papers, and there's @jroakes 's cool https://t.co/cxRUGGrCus , which lets you play around with factors & weights. More words is not better.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
Not because of page size limitations:
Most search engines can index content with hundreds of megabytes. Assuming the average word is 8 bytes, that would mean you should have over 10 million words/page to maximize your chances. Over 12 bibles. 17x War & Peace. 200x Farenheit 451. Per page. Sounds challenging.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
Not because of snippets, in any event, those are interface things, not ranking things:
I don't think so (but also I didn't check because the question is usually about ranking, not UI); some words can be really long, so it's hard to use that for UI decisions.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
Word count does not make content more comprehensible:
Why would the number of words be related to whether or not the content is comprehensive?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
This is a nice set of tweets from John Mueller of Google on the topic of word count and content.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
