“Article too brief” is a Google News-specific article content problem in Google Search Console. It recommends in that part to “ensure your articles include more than 80 words.” Google’s Danny Sullivan stated on Twitter that the reference may be removed since “people shouldn’t be worried about word count.”
Here’s An Example:
The article is too brief.
The article body retrieved from the HTML page appears to be too short to be a new article. This is true for the vast majority of pages that contain news briefs or multimedia content rather than entire news articles. We generate this error to avoid including potentially incorrect text.
Recommendations
Try breaking up your pieces into text chunks of a few sentences. We will not be able to add an article if it appears to have too few words to constitute a news piece. Make sure your article is longer than 80 words.
As Google has often stated, word count is not a ranking criterion, therefore this reference is contradictory to previous Google recommendations. So Danny Sullivan said Google may remove this reference.
Here Is The Context For This Misunderstanding:
Even by my standards, an article of 80 words is short, and I write short. Thin content is described widely in SEO as website content that does not deliver value to visitors. Short, shallow, non-original, scraped, duplicate, doorway, or low-quality affiliate material is an example. Thin material, in general, does not rank well in Google Search because Google dislikes it.
Google Search Console Is The Best To Examine Thin Content
Google Search Console is one of the best tools for detecting thin content. This is because it provides nice, intuitive statistics, but it also shows you exactly how Google sees your website, which is what most of us are interested in.
Blog content or landing pages that do not receive any search traffic, despite the fact that they should, are excellent indicators of thin content. That is, you should look for posts and pages that have already had enough time to rank correctly.
If you come across any sites that are expected to rank but aren’t, it could mean that the material is weak – or at the very least, substandard.
Additionally, look through the “Manual Actions” tab to see if you haven’t already been penalised in some way. Although the tool’s name refers to the manual penalties that Google’s review team used to give, most of the modern penalties that appear in there are algorithmic, in my opinion.
Finally, the Coverage tool provides detailed information on how Google perceives and handles your pages. Once there, click on the “Excluded” tab to discover all of the pages that Google opted not to include in their index – and why. Some of the greatest reports to look into are:
- Crawled but not yet indexed
- Duplicate without user-chosen canonical
- submitted URL not selected as canonical
- Google chose a different canonical than the user