How high of a word count is too high?

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   GwennyOhposted 4 years ago

   I am writing a piece now, that is currently 3000 words, and still rising; as things stand it appears that it will be around 4000 words. In the past I have written two part articles on HP and they tend not to fly, so I don't want to divide it in two. It would be okay to split it in two and move it to my blog, but I really wanted it here.
   
   Opinions please, on what constitutes too high of a word count, and if you think that a 4000 word article would fly here.
   
   For the record, if I went through and cut out excess verbiage, it wouldn't be a whole lot smaller; I did that as I went along.

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      theraggededgeposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      I have one of 6,522. It takes as many words as it takes, I guess.
      
      And, although, my traffic is down, and it's only getting 199 views (today), its total views are 308,847.

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      lobobrandonposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      There is no upper limit. My hubs tend to be around 3k words on average. I have a few that touched 4k.

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         GwennyOhposted 4 years agoin reply to this

         Oh good! glad to hear it. Thanks to both theraggededge and lobobrandon for sharing this fantastic news.

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      chef-de-jourposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      There are no upper limits to word count but it's important you keep giving concise, relevant and useful information throughout the article. Several of mine stretch to between 3000 - 5000 and one to 9000.

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   4. 85

      Miebakagh57posted 4 years agoin reply to this

      Between 3000 and 4000 is idea. Although no maximum or upper limit of words exists for authors.                                                                       But a minimum of 850 to 1560 is set by HP.                                                                               With 4000 words, how interersting, captivatinp, informative, and educting is the issue. I had an article of 3500 words with a page view of 10,000. Traffic later declined and the articl defeatured. I think these days, it is had to envisage what web visitors had in mind that could warrant long attention.

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   Marisa Writesposted 4 years ago

   I agree that there is no upper limit.  However in my observation, it's not easy to write over 4,000 words while sticking to just one aspect of a subject.  Usually, if you take a step back and  analyse it, you'll realise that you've covered two aspects, which can be separated with only a little effort.   
   
   If that's the case, then I think it's definitely worth doing, because it gives you double the chance of being ranked on Google because you have two different titles to play with.  Worth a thought.
   
   Notice I'm not saying, split the article halfway.  That's too simplistic and always a bad idea.

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      GwennyOhposted 4 years agoin reply to this

      Great observation... I was thinking about this, that there are multiple topics within it that align with it, but could easily be extracted to create self standing articles. I may do that.

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   eugbugposted 4 years ago

   One of my troubleshooting guides is 11,000 words plus, but there's also over 30 photos. It's wise though to break any article down into lots of short paragraphs and interleave with diagrams/photos. Otherwise readers with a short attention span will make a hasty exit. One exception I guess is when the content is creative writing or a human experience story which may engross the reader.

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   Marisa Writesposted 4 years ago

   I don't know of any basis for claiming that 3000 to 4000 words is ideal.  The founder of HubPages always said the "sweet spot" for a Hub was 1,500 words.   More recently, he is on record as saying that Hubs of around 2,500 words are now doing very well.

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      Miebakagh57posted 4 years agoin reply to this

      The 3000 to 4000 is my opinion on a thread I post for discussion some months ago.                                            Glad that the founder of  HubPages said 2500 words articles are doing well. I have not heard of of till today. I will leverage on it. Besides, some of my featured articles below 1500 words on review will be steadily move to 2500 words.

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