Shorter news articles and blogs can be just as relevant and valuable for readers as long-form content, according to Google’s SEO expert John Mueller.
While a growing body of evidence in recent studies suggests that long reads are better for driving traffic and shares, shorter forms of content can still hit the right spot and rank for important keywords and queries.
Mueller stated that Google does not care about “the length of articles” when it comes to web search and that there is no reason to use noindex tags for very short content.
Noindex tags are used by webmasters to inform search engines that they do not want a particular page to be indexed and ranked in SERPs.
Mueller added: “Sometimes short articles are completely fine. I wouldn’t focus so much on the length of the article, but rather do you want it indexed or not?”
This suggests that brands could benefit from green-lighting campaigns with a mix of shorter and longer word counts.
If an article with 250 words or less can be useful in some way and answer a user’s query, it seems that Google will be ready and willing to put it front and centre in search results.
Google has regularly stated that its mission is to deliver the most relevant results for a particular query, and this does not always mean that content has to contain a few thousand words.
Mueller also recently talked about backlinks and whether having a number of different references from third-party sites is better overall.
He stated that a single quality link from the right website can be just as good as a larger number of lower-quality links.
Mueller concluded that Google’s algorithm looks at the relevance of links for a particular website or piece of content, rather than how many there are.
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