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Is There Anything Wrong with Writing…

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Is There Anything Wrong with Writing 500 Word Blog Posts?

Written by James Parsons on August 29th, 2020 in Blogging

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I’m a proponent of longer blog posts, as you can probably tell from both my blog and from the blog posts my company produces for others. I believe that longer posts range better, perform better, and are better received by audiences. I’m not the only one.

Table of Contents

The History of 500 Words

The Modern Word Count

Stronger Competition, Longer Content

Blog Posts Versus Page Content

Attention Span and Content Skimming

The Broad Versus Narrow Dilemma

A Final Word

The History of 500 Words

You might be wondering why 500 words are the go-to length for so many people. The answer, like it is with many SEO standards, is “it was just enough.”

Years ago, before Google’s content marketing updates Panda and Penguin, marketers could put whatever they wanted on a page. They would often simply copy other content, either legitimately (by copying product descriptions from manufacturers) or illegitimately (by copying website content from their competitors.) This led to search results that were frequently page after page of, essentially, the same thing on different domains. Very few websites were creating unique content because they didn’t need to.

It’s as if Google listened to the people and thought “hey, it turns out these mini-pages aren’t very comprehensive or useful”. When users have to page through four or five sets of results just to find more than one or two unique pages, something is wrong. Those users certainly aren’t satisfied, and why bother having duplicate content anyways?

Panda, the algorithmic update from 2011, was the primary driving force that killed off duplicate content and thin content. It’s where the 500-word minimum sprang up, and why it has stuck around for so long.



See, anything less than 500 words doesn’t have much time to dig into a subject. For reference, this article you’re reading right now, as of this sentence, is 277 words. That’s over half of what a 500-word post contains, and I’ve barely even skimmed the surface of this topic.

If you cut out the fluff, if you cut out context, if you take a question and you answer it with no further information, then sure, you can write a blog post in 500 words. But why 500, and not 400, or 600? There are three primary reasons:

It’s a nice round number. 500 is half of 1000 and it’s easy to parse. People like numbers that are nice and pleasing.

It’s an easy “unit price” for content mills. Sites that pay freelance writers need to attract clients, and those clients need something attractive to buy. A 500-word blog post makes a good building blog as an example: a 500 words article costs $x dollars.

It’s a “good minimum”, or at least it used to be. When Panda first rolled out, millions of websites scrambled to update to adjust to the new normal. Many of them needed to buy replacements for dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of blog posts on their site. Many more needed to buy all-new content for product pages and other site pages as well. The sites that couldn’t afford this failed and died.

With these three things in mind, 500 words proved to be a good baseline. Blog posts could be successful at 400, or 350, or 300 words, but 500 became a good breaking point where the post was more likely to rank than not, and these were affordable enough to potentially work at volume. Remember, this was back in the relatively early days of content marketing, so standards were a lot lower. You weren’t competing against sites with 2,000-word blog posts, you were competing with sites that just got hammered for having duplicate content.



The bar was very low and easy to clear, and sites that could crank out thousands of 500-word blog posts were doing so successfully before being affected by algorithm updates and rising competition. That was almost a decade ago, and yet, this 500 word “gold standard” is still being tossed around. T