Google's John Mueller replied to a bunch of screenshots of SEO tools showing word counts for the same page that tailed the word counts differently. John said, "This is also why word-count itself makes so little sense."
He posted this on Bluesky in response to that specific use case.
But it goes beyond that. We covered word count here countless times (no pun intended) - here are some of those stories:
- Google Drops Article Too Short & Word Count Section From The Search Console Content Errors
- Google Erased The Keyword Density Slide From Digital Marketing Certification Coursework
- Google: Our Search Algorithm Doesn't Look At Words Per Section
- Google: Word Count For SEO & Google Rankings Is Not A Thing
- Google: Word Count Is Not A Sign Of Thin Or Unhelpful Content
- Google: We Don't Count Words Or Links On Your Blog Posts
- Google Looking At Upper Limit Of Word Count? Probably Not But Get To The Point.
- Google On Word Count As A Ranking Signal
- Google: Word Count, Link Count, Anchor Text Ratios Are Not Indicative Of Quality
- Google: Word Count Isn't Indicative Of Quality
- Google: Word Count Is Not A Ranking Factor
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
