Google’s John Mueller covered lots and lots of myths this past Friday in the Google Hangout on Google+. He said at the 34:37 minute mark that having short articles won’t give you a Google penalty. He also said that even some long articles can be confusing for users. He said that short articles can be great and long articles can be great – it is about your users, not search engines.

The question posed was:

Back in 2012, Google said short articles can rank well and then again in 2014 said short articles are not low quality. John said in 2016:

I specifically did the Google Consumer Surveys approach when I was hit by the Panda 4.1 update, which I recovered from on Panda 4.2. I even published my results for all to see over here and it showed, people, my readers, like my short content.

So it really isn’t about how short, tall, long or detailed you are. As long as the content satisfies the user, Google should be satisfied too.

Here is the video embed:

Forum discussion at Google+.