Will Google Love Short Content Articles? – Quality vs Quantity

Recently, Matt Cutts from Google Webmaster team said, Google will penalize guest blogging websites. Its a well known fact that Google loves good content. But the point is, will Google love short content or not. This query is pretty common in the blogging, content development communities. Most of the writers are implementing a new era of writing online content. Everything got changed from Introduction, to conclusion. Generally, all bloggers and webmasters will have this doubt of producing short content. Though it takes same knowledge and time to produce a bigger content, we still do it for better rankings. Google will always appreciate quality content. But why are we unable to produce great content in short articles? Though reasons are many, we should get a perfect knowledge on what exactly is the magic count for writing articles.

Will Google Love Short Content Articles

Recently in a conversation, few bloggers raised an important topic about the article length. This topic was raised by a news blog, who base their reports with various sources. This blog had a bunch of writers who can write big articles with detailed opinions and descriptions. Though the article was very informative, the members of that community preferred short articles with quick opinions on the news. The news blog responded to this suggestion and started to write short content articles [ around 200 words]  in their blog. Though these short articles were very useful and easy to read, Google didn’t showed much interest to rank them up.  Soon this issue was a hot topic to discuss among other blog communities. The major part of the issue was,

• Will Google love short content articles?
• Is it good to write in depth articles for good rankings?
• Should we stick to our loyal audience, or Google rankings?
• How far will Google rank short content articles?

Responding to these above queries, a lot of people expressed their views and comments via various communities. Below are the most important factors which may benefit your article.

• Google wants rich, compelling and unique quality content.
• Visitors want rich, compelling and unique quality content.
• Size doesn’t matter from Google perspective.
• Google gives much importance to authorship approved articles.
• The quality of the article should be rich with good knowledge.
• Article size doesn’t matter, what matters is the quality and knowledge about the subject.
• Even if your site reputation is going down, your authorship quality will go up.
• Writing a 800 word article with 2-3 main points will rank well compared to 300 words article.
• Your articles will perform good if you have a good social media community.

Answering all these queries, John Mueller, who is a Google webmaster trends analyst said,

Rest assured, Googlebot doesn’t just count words on a page or in an article, even short articles can be very useful & compelling to users. For example, we also crawl and index tweets, which are at most 140 characters long. That said, if you have users who love your site and engage with it regularly, allowing them to share comments on your articles is also a great way to bring additional information onto the page. Sometimes a short article can trigger a longer discussion — and sometimes users are looking for discussions like that in search. That said, one recommendation that I’d like to add is to make sure that your content is really unique (not just rewritten, autogenerated, etc) and of high-quality.

Cheers
John Mueller
Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

This above comment clarifies all the existing queries about short content articles. So there is nothing that Google love short content articles, its just that you have to have rich quality and good social communication in your community. Though the short articles are triggered most of the time, you can still make a long discussions out of them.

By taking all this information into consideration, I think we don’t need to put much efforts in writing long content articles. Please let me know what you think about this conversation.