Google's John Mueller responded on Twitter saying that word counts, anchor texts to word rations, number of backlinks, number of external links, the percentage of anchor text and so on is not "indicative of quality." Here is the tweet and John's response.
None of those numbers are indicative of quality.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 9, 2018
So, if none of those are indicators of quality, how does Google measure quality?
Or maybe John is saying that articles with fewer words or fewer links can be just as high quality as the article above?
I just don't think any SEO would agree with John that these specific metrics are not, at least in some way, used by Google's ranking algorithm to measure both quality and relevancy. Maybe the external links from a page is not but the others?
Should SEOs obsess about these metrics. No. But are they indicative of how Google measures quality? Maybe? But John is saying it is not?
Forum discussion at Twitter.