200,000 Words Won’t Necessarily Imply Your Website is Authoritative

Google’s John Mueller stated that a website does not need to have 200,000 words to be regarded as authoritative. 

This comes after a Twitter user said, “You need around 200,000 words on your website to be considered authoritative by Google.” To which, John replied, “I don’t know who made up that 200,000-word number, it’s definitely not from Google.”

Here are those tweets:

This implies that a website having 20 articles on it or 200,000 words on it is not always considered authoritative. 

A few years back, in 2019, John said word count is not a ranking factor while in 2018 John said word count is not indicative of quality. Google has also stated that it won’t penalize your site for short articles ensuring the content is relevant, original and answers users’ queries.

Lately, Google also removed the reference to word count in the Search Console document. So, what matters is focussing on quality content rather on excessive word count.