Should cornerstone content have 3,500 words? Does Google discern words from the main text and from the references?

[kvillalobos]

Is it true that cornerstone content should have at least 3,500 words? I've done some research and found that the recommended amount is between 2K-10k.

Also, the content that we create/publish has a lot of references/citations at the end of each article. Does Google discern words from the main text and from the references? Meaning should I count references as part of the word count?

Thanks for the help!

[MiriamEllis]

A Very Happy New Year to you, too! So glad my reply was helpful to you, and good luck with your publication.

[kvillalobos]

Thanks so much for your detailed response Miriam! This is very helpful. Happy New Year!

[MiriamEllis]

Hello There!

Earlier this year, we had a good discussion about Cornerstone Content (a term that is widely used by Yoast though not by everyone else) here on the forum. You might like to take a look: https://moz.com/community/q/are-core-pages-considered-cornerstones.

Yoast is a very respected company, and they've created some classic products. That being said, I personally question advice like this being given on their blog:

"You’ll need to write an article of at least 900 words."

_900 words _sounds to me more like a public school writing assignment than criteria for a professional writer or publisher. Let's talk about this.

Wordstream has been kind enough to cite Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO as a good example of cornerstone content. I've contributed to that guide along with other staff here, and can attest that a specific number of words was nowhere in the plan for contributing. Instead, the plan is to cover the topic at hand thoroughly, and this is what all good writing, both on and off the web, does. Because of this, while I can appreciate that there is a desire to know if there's a word count that impresses Google, I don't think it's a good way to think about writing or publishing. If it takes 500 words to explain something, write them. If it takes 10,000 words, write them. The point is to explain a topic to a reader in a way that engages them and results in them feeling fully informed.

My best guess is that a company like Yoast is striving to offer some general guidelines for strong, lucrative publishing strategies, but when people start throwing set numbers around, it doesn't match my concept of building authority as a publication. I would rather that publishers focus on quality than word counts. The only time I can see the necessity of counting words is in offline publications that have limited paper space for an article. On the web, they sky's the limit, and the quality of what you publish is what wins readers.