Longer articles rank higher.
But in order to be longer, they often drift away from the main topic and get overwritten to such an extent that the reader loses reading interest before hitting the back button.
It is a very concerning issue for content producers, who don’t have sufficient time, effort and resources to create long-form content consistently (only to please search engines). And for readers, particularly those who are looking for quick answers to their questions, it’s a frustrating experience.
While it’s believed that long-form content gets higher rankings, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller has a different answer.
He’s spoken on this topic earlier, most recently on Twitter.
While answering a user’s query about the preferred word length, Mueller tweeted “Why would a search engine use word count as a metric”
The interesting discussion followed, with few other Twitter users joining the discussion in the hope of any revelation perhaps? 🙂
Mueller later confirmed that while word count is not used for ranking, “It’s fine to use word counts for *yourself* as a guideline for your content, if it encourages better content from your writers.”
Earlier, he said in a Reddit thread that word count is NOT a ranking factor. In his words “Word count is not a ranking factor. Save yourself the trouble”
In another Tweet dated early 2020, he confirmed that matching the word count of top ranked sites is not going to help a page rank on SERP.
Mueller’s latest tweet reconfirms his standing on word count.
Conclusion
So if you are thinking having tons of content is an SEO hack to lift organic ranking, think twice. Provide value by producing the best available resource on the Internet for a search query.
In order to do that, your content may become wordy because in order to be the best resource on the Internet, you may have to accommodate a lot of information inside the content.