Does more content help SEO?

Article is an article no matter is it 200 or 2500 words i still think it will rank the same. The advantage is you use more keywords if you work on long articles.
 
To my extent, Google estimates the quality of content basing on other specialized/technical words related to the main KW, which are called "LSI keywords" by SEOers. Long articles usually have specialized/technical words.

With common sense, you can easily find that helpful articles usually contain specialized/technical words, while SEO articles focus on the main KW only, other words are normal. However, if you try to put the specialized/technical words unnaturally, the articles will become unreadable and this leads to a high bounce rate which will hurt your ranking.

So, in order to improve your SERP rising, you have no way but to put high quality content on your money site.

Yet, I believe with the tier 2 and higher, the articles is not necessarily readable, so I personally think you can put specialized/technical words unnaturally (and it becomes unreadable, of course, but why do you need people to read your pyramid structure ?)
 
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I would disagree with you James. I have found longer articles with multiple H tags that support LSI keywords to be ranking better than short articles targeted with 1-2 keywords. Right now I am testing if articles with url's such as "finding furniture part 1" then another post with part 2 rank better.

Pretty much agree there... but the main thing is that no matter how long the article, you have to make sure that in answers user's query.
I'd rather personally read a short article which concisely answers my question... but if you want to target multiple keywords with one particular article then longer article will rank better.
 
As long as you have content posted daily, you should be fine. Short articles aren't ideal, but if it's all you can do sometimes, it shouldn't be a problem. If the article is well written and gives the users enough info, it should be fine I believe.
 
I haven't done extensive testing lately, but it seems G is becoming very good at deciphering "good" content. I'm not just talking about bounce rates etc. I think they have come a long ways. One year ago I could rank WAC spun content. Not anymore. If you make sure all your articles are on point I think WAC Tier 1 content is ok for, well Tier 1+.

Would you be able to clarify on what you mean by this? Like are you talking about cloaking so users see different information than what search engines see?



How does Google tell if you've written "well written" content?
 
As long as your article is AT LEAST 400 words you are fine, but you should really push for 500 since that's the magic number right now.

After you hit the minimum 400-500 words the longer the better.
 
The common advice these days is writing long form articles (e.g. around 1000 words) will help you in ranking as opposed to writing shorter articles.

Like say if I was trying to rank an article on Google, does it make a big difference(or any difference?) if with was only 200 or 300 words compared to 800 words? or if I want to rank something well, should I be getting bigger articles?
 
Like say if I was trying to rank an article on Google, does it make a big difference(or any difference?) if with was only 200 or 300 words compared to 800 words? or if I want to rank something well, should I be getting bigger articles?

It Depend's on your content uniqueness, Quality and your keyword density..Google Loves quality and fresh content.
 
well.. i dont know.. if number of words meant that much how do people rank image-blogs?
 
My opinion is, content length is one of may factors in googles algo. Longer will never hurt. So I go with the length my readers want. People with 'Long' Articles advise a lot of sub headings to help people find the information they want.

I would say, with completely no facts, longer is better. The reason is, all of the 'top players' who write guides here (BTB, for example) go with longer. They rank, and make bank.

If I can cover a topic in 500 words, I do it. I just make sure I never skimp on covering the topic.
 
Seems like everyone here has declared themselves "SEO guru's", because everyone says: This is what google wants or they are looking for this now, or short articles rank just as good etc. These are all opinions and certainly not facts, I wish people would stop acting like they know everything and at least state that the BS they are spewing are "their opinions only".

My opinion is this: When was the last time you searched for a popular search term and got a 300-500 word article? Probably never IMO. Nearly all good #1 spots are held by 1000 word articles with tons of pictures with captions, quotes from authority or .gov sites etc. And YES, it is very possible to take top spots on huge buying keywords with good content alone without backlinks. I have ranked some pretty nice terms with one in depth article and 0 backlinks plenty of times. Some of my long articles blow right past the exactmatch.com, .net, .org sites and take over Serps within a week of publishing an article (note that the keywords aren't even in my domain name). Write decent content and you will rank. Write some half assed BS and spam it hard you might eventually rank(and eventually get slapped), but if you don't think goog's algo can determine if content is low quality, you might explain to me how microsoft word has been able to detect grammar problems etc. for 20 years.
 
Seems like everyone here has declared themselves "SEO guru's", because everyone says: This is what google wants or they are looking for this now, or short articles rank just as good etc. These are all opinions and certainly not facts, I wish people would stop acting like they know everything and at least state that the BS they are spewing are "their opinions only".

My opinion is this: When was the last time you searched for a popular search term and got a 300-500 word article? Probably never IMO. Nearly all good #1 spots are held by 1000 word articles with tons of pictures with captions, quotes from authority or .gov sites etc. And YES, it is very possible to take top spots on huge buying keywords with good content alone without backlinks. I have ranked some pretty nice terms with one in depth article and 0 backlinks plenty of times. Some of my long articles blow right past the exactmatch.com, .net, .org sites and take over Serps within a week of publishing an article (note that the keywords aren't even in my domain name). Write decent content and you will rank. Write some half assed BS and spam it hard you might eventually rank(and eventually get slapped), but if you don't think goog's algo can determine if content is low quality, you might explain to me how microsoft word has been able to detect grammar problems etc. for 20 years.

When you write an article and it ranks with 0 backlink, chances are it ranks because of the DA. What is the DA of your site ?

Truth is, sites with low DA need backlinks to rank. Period.
 
Of course, more content help getting traffic and ranking as well. But this should be logical, interesting and unique as well.
 
Content is king and long articles are the king's sword. Here is why:

Google wants their users to find the information they need. A 1k word article is more likely to contain more detail than a 300 word article on the same topic. Also, Google wants to user to like the website Google send them too. If the user bounces, its a good indication that they do not like to website. If a user spends 5 minutes on a website, reading a 1k word article compared to 30 seconds on a website reading a 300 word article, Google thinks that the website with a 5 minute page view is 10x better than the website with a 30 second page view.
 
The most important thing for your website is to have original content which is updated frequently. Also make sure that the topic of the content on your site is consistent
 
I havent see any difference, i vary the numbers of words on my ranked articles, i dont worry too much about it
as long its something interesting and i can keep them on my site for a while
watching a video or something
 
To be sure you should have unique content. And recommended by others. Share other people very helpful article you survive in the SERP
 
I'm sorry but I beg to differ when it comes to the length of the article... I actually prefer short articles, for example if I search for date of birth of some author or I want to know a list of attributes for some html tag, etc, etc... I don't want to spend half a day scanning through long articles trying to find my answer, I'd rather have a very short articles which answers my questions within seconds but it really depends on the topic (if I want to read some in-depth analysis then surely I won't read 200 word summary).

I do not write for the search engines so word count was never a problem for me... my articles can be anywhere between 100 and 3000 words, depending on the topic and how deep I want to cover it (I don't really like very long articles so I prefer to split them into multiple topics).

Seems like everyone here has declared themselves "SEO guru's", because everyone says: This is what google wants or they are looking for this now, or short articles rank just as good etc. These are all opinions and certainly not facts, I wish people would stop acting like they know everything and at least state that the BS they are spewing are "their opinions only".

My opinion is this: When was the last time you searched for a popular search term and got a 300-500 word article? Probably never IMO. Nearly all good #1 spots are held by 1000 word articles with tons of pictures with captions, quotes from authority or .gov sites etc. And YES, it is very possible to take top spots on huge buying keywords with good content alone without backlinks. I have ranked some pretty nice terms with one in depth article and 0 backlinks plenty of times. Some of my long articles blow right past the exactmatch.com, .net, .org sites and take over Serps within a week of publishing an article (note that the keywords aren't even in my domain name). Write decent content and you will rank. Write some half assed BS and spam it hard you might eventually rank(and eventually get slapped), but if you don't think goog's algo can determine if content is low quality, you might explain to me how microsoft word has been able to detect grammar problems etc. for 20 years.
 
Dear,
The more important factor is the quality rather quantity. So, if an article is elongated just to please Google, it will go in vein.
Try to work for your readers, as Google will ultimately like it too....
 
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