We know Google has told us for many years that word count is not a thing, Google doubled down on it last year. Google's John Mueller reiterated that over the weekend saying not just words on a page but also links on a page are not counted by Google.
John Mueller from Google wrote on LinkedIn, "Nobody at Google counts the links or the words on your blog posts."
I don't think I quoted a Googler saying Google does not count links before. Yea, Google said that with words, but I have not seen it with links specifically. Although, links are often part of words.
He said, "and even if they did, I'd still recommend writing for your audience. I don't know your audience, but I have yet to run across *anyone* who counts the words before reading a piece of content."
This was in response to the question asked:
It's a common practice among SEOs to believe that adding a total of 2-5 internal links and around 1-3 external links in a 1000-word blog post is beneficial. They also think that adding more links could be harmful to their site, while adding fewer links might not provide much value. Could you please clarify whether the quantity of links really matters?
Here is a screenshot of these posts:
As a reminder, this topic of word count and Google SEO is something I covered here countless times. Most recently, Google said in 2023, that word count is not a thing and showed so by slashing its own SEO starter guide down by a ton. Google said in 2022 word count is not sign of unhelp content. In 2019, John said word count is not a ranking factor and in 2018 John said word count is not indicative of quality. Google won't penalize you for short articles and Google said short articles can rank well and then again in 2014 said short articles are not low quality. Google has been recently saying to avoid fluff leading some to believe Google may not rank fluff well in the future.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
