SEO Best Practices for Short Articles on News Sites According to Google’s John Mueller

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller recently made recommendations and answered questions related to publishing short articles on news sites.

While the idea that content is king and long form articles are what content writers should focus on for SEO value leading to more traffic, followers and earnings, many people now publishing on news sites are debating how applicable this is to their work. These questions got back to Google’s John Mueller who weighed in on the topic.

Writers for News Break can now get credit for articles that are only 600 words long, half of what was originally required. This is more in line with other news content released by major sites. At the same time, in order to gain attention and a high rate of traffic, writers need to pay attention to SEO practices for shorter content.

Mueller’s overall advice is that writers who write for news sites like News Break shouldn’t worry much about the length of their articles. He says that often times short articles are fine for the query they are answering. But the query must be the focus.

This is a commonly discussed area among content writers concerned with SEO. Often news stories, especially when they discuss breaking news, are short as that is the news format and these stories focus on facts usually without opinion or commentary. Because of this, there is only so much to add to a news story without including fluff of superfluous information. Yet when content is short, writers worry about search engines evaluating it as “thin content,” which translates into it not being viewed as valuable which will hurt SEO performance.

Although Google doesn’t target individual pages and instead evaluates content across a single site, writers worry that if the site is a news site, the articles across their own domain location as well as across the site in general are likely to be short and so everyone might be penalized for thin content.

Some writers are even considering “noindex’ing” some of their shortest articles, in case it might help their domain or site in search rankings. Their fear is not unreasonable as Google does devalue thin content.

Google’s most recent updates have focused on user experience and thin content is thought to frustrate readers who are specifically looking for the answer to a question. A writer asked Mueller if they should noindex their short posts so that Google doesn’t see them and penalize the site for thin content.

Mueller replied that this depends on whether you want the pages indexed or not. As most people write to have their work seen, to get followers and have their work read, they won’t want to have their pages not indexed. He said he doesn’t think a nonindex tag should be added just because an article is short since short stories can often answer a query better than longer ones with fluff added which can confuse the reader or obscure the answer.

Adding fluff or related but tangential content to increase word count has been a common tactic of writers as for the past several years Google indicated that long content wasbetter. The sweet spot for Google in 2015 was 1260, in 2017 it was 2500 and there have been some who have analyzed the most popular articles which rank the highest (not blog posts) and suggested the new sweet spot is closer to 3000 words. Yet for news pieces, that can seem excessive and forced.

Short articles are not automatically viewed as thin content by search engines. Google does not assess the value of content based on length alone. Their focus has become about user satisfaction and whether the results that come up answer the users query.

Additionally, long articles can just as easily be viewed as thin content. For example, if they’re full of spam, content that doesn’t seem to contribute closely to the article topic or doesn’t contribute something unique to the discussion they could be viewed as thin content. Content that’s duplicated or scraped together from other sources, with no new information included will also be considered thin content.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The long and the short of it (no pun intended) is that short content can be perfectly fine if it answers the user’s query in a way that hasn’t been said before, if it contributes something new and original to previous answers, or it is a breaking news update that other sites don’t have. This is difficult for individual writers when competing with the major news sites as they do on platforms like News Break.

In these cases, when trying to write short news stories that haven’t been done to death, first determine what the readers query is likely to be about your topic. If one direction of the story has been written about everywhere, ask yourself what isn’t in the articles you’ve read that a reader might want to know about. What holes need to be plugged? Then write that story.

If a story has only been written once then syndicated everywhere verbatim, see if you can write it better. What’s missing from the story? What other interpretation of the facts might fit and is there anything to back that up? Does it seem like perhaps the facts are slightly off or do you feel the facts have been skewed to prove a certain point or perspective? Point that out and make a case for why your account is more factual or accurate.

It’s important to remember that Google’s goal is to provide the user with the best results for every search they do, not the longest or wordiest.

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