I’ll be honest, John Mueller of Google has confused me on this one… In a hangout from the other day at the 30:41 mark into the video, someone asked John about how Google grades or calculates the quality of the content around things like reading level. In John’s answer, he kind of flipped flopped back and forth and danced around the concept of scoring reading levels and how it impacts the rankings of web pages.

What I think he is saying, and I’ll post the video and transcript below, is that sometimes having a super high reading level is not always the best thing for your content. This is because if you have super scientific or technical terms and the average reader has no clue what it means, how is that going to help you rank for what the average user is searching for. On the most basic level, if someone wants their site to rank better in Google but never heard of SEO, maybe you want to have a page about ranking higher in Google and try to rank for that phrase over the term SEO. But obviously with academic terms or medical terms it gets more relevant.

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

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Here is how Glenn Gabe summarized it:

I should add that Google 100% had a reading level score and even at one point showed those details in the search results.

Forum discussion at Twitter.