One of the things I see so often in the SEO space is that SEOs say you need your pages to have a word count of X for Google to want to index and rank it well. The truth is, that is not true - if it was, Google wouldn't rank Twitter URLs or stories here. :)
John Mueller said on Twitter this morning "word count is not indicative of quality." "Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries," he added.
I have been a huge believer in keeping content short and to the point. In fact, I personally feel insulted when someone adds a huge amount of fluff to their content - be it written or spoken - in order to fill space. Say what you need to say and get on with it. People have limited time on this planet, one thing we cannot do it give back time lost. So keep things short, to the point.
Here is John's tweet:
I agree with you & Mihai :). Word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have a lot of words that say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important & relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 24, 2018
I try to keep my stories short, often it isn't easy - I literally can go on for hours about most topics I write about here. But I know how much I hate when people repeat the same message in content and presentations - so I try hard not to do that here.
You don't have to worry, 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.
There is a fine line one has to balance on giving enough information for the reader and not giving too much or too little. Most people I know give too much. This is why the web gods made hyperlinks, so people can read more if they want more.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
