Yoast text length: the 300 word minimum, and why it is not Google's

The scoring bands, and why very short texts sink the whole score

For regular posts and pages, Yoast scores text length in five bands:

The last two bands carry negative scores in Yoast's scoring model (minus 10 and minus 20). Because the overall SEO score averages every individual check, a negative score does not just make one light red; it pulls the whole score down, which is why a 90 word draft can look far worse than its other checks suggest.

Cornerstone content raises the bar to 900 words, with orange from 400 to 899. Japanese text is measured in characters, with 600 as the standard minimum. Category and tag pages are scored by a separate check, Text length for taxonomy pages.

How 300 words became a rule of thumb

Word minimums took hold around the time Google started acting against thin content, most visibly with the Panda update in 2011, which targeted low-quality pages built to rank with little substance. Short pages were an easy symptom to spot, so "write at least 300 words" became common advice, and plugins encoded it.

The symptom and the cause are different things. Panda-era problems were pages with nothing useful on them: spun articles, doorway pages, near-empty category pages. Length was a proxy for that, and it is still a reasonable proxy for a draft that stops before it has explained anything.

What Google actually says about length

Google's guidance on people-first content lists writing to a particular word count as a warning sign, and states plainly that Google does not have a preferred word count. Its representatives have repeated that word count is not a ranking factor.

What Google does reward is a page that satisfies the search. Some searches need 2,000 words and diagrams. Others, like "what time zone is Denver in", need one sentence. A 150 word page that answers its question completely can outrank a padded 1,200 word page that makes the reader dig.

So the red light tells you the page is short. It cannot tell you whether the page is thin.

Adding length only where it adds value

If a post is short because it is unfinished, the fixes are the useful ones:

• Answer the follow-up question a reader would ask next.
• Add a worked example, a table, or the steps you skipped.
• Explain the exception or edge case you glossed over.

If it is short because the topic is small, leave it. Pages that are correctly brief include glossary entries, contact and location pages, product pages with specifications, event listings, and short announcements. Padding them with introductions and restated points makes them worse for readers and does nothing for rankings.

If you have many genuinely thin pages, think about merging them. A cluster of 150 word posts on closely related questions often works better as one thorough page; see prune thin content.

A simple test for any page: if a reader would have to search again after reading it, it is too short. If they would skip whole sections to find the answer, it is too long.

Content length in Hydrogen SEO

Hydrogen SEO's SEO score measures content length in characters of text, with the HTML removed. Full points start at 1,500 characters, which is roughly 250 words of English; 800 characters earns 15 of 20 points and 300 characters earns 10. Its docs say directly that a short announcement or a glossary entry will score lower, and that this can be exactly right.