Google's Digital Marketing Certification Course SEO Advice Includes Word Count & Keyword Density

Google offered its official Google taught and backed digital marketing certification and courses, as we reported about a couple weeks ago. Guess what SEO advice and recommendations Google offers in this course? Yep, having more than 300 words on a page and making sure you have an\ keyword density of about 2%.

As a reminder, these courses are taught by Googlers, Google said "all course instructors are Google employees who are subject-matter experts." And Googlers actually wrote a slide that says "write more than 300 words on your web page, your webpage is more likely to be ranked higher in search engine result pages if you write a higher volume of quality content." Google also wrote "keep your keyword density below an industry standard of 2%, this means that 2% of the words on the webpage or fewer should be target keywords."

Here is the slide from Gianluca Fiorelli on Twitter of this course:

Danny Sullivan from Google replied on Twitter saying "I'm not on the team that produced that, nor are they part of the Search team." Danny said the advice is not correct, he said "as someone from the Search team, we don't recommend any limits or "density" or anything like that." He then said "this can be ignored", to ignore that advice from a Google taught class.

Here is his tweet:

I'm not on the team that produced that, nor are they part of the Search team. As someone from the Search team, we don't recommend any limiits or "density" or anything like that. This can be ignored; I'll pass it on. Our advice from Search is here. https://t.co/zjvjWismrV

— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) May 9, 2022

Another reason why Google should not be offering digital marketing certification than include course material on SEO. We did see this coming and knew this was a bad idea in general for Google to offer any certification that includes SEO. Now, even more so when the SEO advice is something the Google Search team is telling you to "ignore."

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Google dropped that slide from the course work within 24 hours:

So, @21Interferenze sent me an update about the SEO part of the Digital Marketing course by Google on Coursera, and they quit the keyword stuffing part. Screenshot below ⬇️
cc: @rustybrick @dannysullivan pic.twitter.com/moX3VRKI5L

— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) May 11, 2022