Last week, I included in my recap a link to a Reddit thread that seems to have got some attention. It has John Mueller of Google saying a site with only 30 articles is not enough to be authoritative and be fully indexed by Google. Now people are asking if the minimum for being authoritative is having over 30 articles on your site.
The Reddit thread said "Less Than 50% Of New Articles Are Indexing -- Authoritative Site." Here is John's response:
I don't see anything broken in the way Google indexes stuff at the moment. I do see us being critical about what we pick up for indexing though, as any search engine should.It's really hard to call a site authoritative after 30 articles, and especially if you've stopped publishing for a while, I can see how Google might be a bit more conservative with regards to indexing more. Over time, as we see that your site is more than just "30 ok posts", and instead something we're keen on sending as many users to as possible, then indexing will pick up. This isn't something you can push through technical means though, it's not the button-push before indexing that makes your site by far the best of its kind. Making your site "just as good / bad as others" is not compelling -- you should really aim significantly higher, and not just with regards to the text on your pages, but in regards to everything across your site, and its embedding within the rest of the world / web.
I think some other SEO publications picked it up and now people may be misinterpreting what John was saying. There is no specific number, it is not like if you hit 31 articles, your site is not eligible to be authoritative inGoogle Search. He was just saying, it takes time for a site to earn credibility in anyone's eyes It is not like you write 30 articles and bam, you now are authoritative.
Here are some of those tweets - to be clear, Izzy did not feel 30 is some sort of magic number. She is saying in her tweets below that there is buzz from people in the industry that this might be a magic number. She did not believe it and wanted John to clarify, which he did and why I am covering this.
so am I right in thinking that it's just best practice to publish high quality, well researched content that will be useful to the user as often as we can, and that building authority takes time but it's not about actual numbers so much?
— Izzy Wisniewska (@Izzy_CM) November 16, 2021
There's no fixed number. I'd think outside of SEO. Think "nutrition" (from your profile), what would you want to see before you consider advice from an unknown site to be authoritative for new advice? More than 30 days of blog posts, I hope?
— 🧀 John 🧀 (@JohnMu) November 16, 2021
That was exactly what I was thinking - I usually use an analogy if you would want to ask someone for a health or financial advice, who would that be? In whatever niche, your website should be that someone :) being this someone will definitely take more than 30 days. Thanks John
— Izzy Wisniewska (@Izzy_CM) November 16, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
