Google has always made sure the number of words in a piece of content no SEO ranking factor. The company states that this is not one of the quality factors that reviewers deal with and that even short content such as news and press releases can be positioned in the same way as longer articles.
Neither Google BERT nor the rich results, the number of words in a piece of content does not affect SEO positioning.
Despite the times when the company’s experts explained this problem, users keep asking about it. The reason may be because SEO guides, lots of articles on experts on the subject, and even some SEO plugins like YOASTs indicate that the content to be properly positioned on Google is there must be longer than 600 words.
This time it was John Mueller, an SEO expert at Google, who again answered a question from a user on Twitter and asked, “If I can cover more information in fewer words than my competitors, what will he think? Google of my content? ». To which Müller replied, “Why should word count be a rank metric?”
Below you can see the tweet with the question and answer from Müller himself:
Why should a search engine use word count as a metric?
– 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
Other users joined the conversation. One of them, Sam Gupta, claimed that the new BERT algorithm ranked all pages with a word count greater than 4,000 better. Mueller reiterates that this is wrong and urges the user to read some of the studies done with BERT that show word count is of no importance in positioning.
Here is Mueller’s tweet and response:
That is not right. If you’re curious about how search engines might use technology like BERT, there is plenty of research out there and @jroake’s cool https://t.co/cxRUGGrCus to play around with factors and weights. More words are not better.
– 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 31, 2020
The conversation continued, and Mueller explained that neither the page limits nor the space on the search results page for the large results had an effect on the word count. She also noted that using more words doesn’t make the content more understandable, so it wouldn’t make sense to make it a ranking factor.
