This is a popular question among bloggers, i deliberately brought out this question to give my own answers with 5 years experience with blogging.

bloggers thinks longer articles(500-1000 words above) get rank than shorter articles( 100-200 words) and this discourage people to start blogging.
people always say long articles are been index and rank faster than short articles............but Google don't care all they need is what your users like. if you write 10000 words and users just get scared and log out that means your bounce rate has increase and Google will regard your website to be less important. i have little idea with blogging so i can tell users love articles with nice and many photos to feed their eyes not articles. they love brief article to read and move to another. they are some people who just wonder what appears to them from Google and they just select randomly with post with attractive pictures. for instance i search for the term " Rolando" and i saw many post about Ronald that ranked first page, but i may likely click on the one with the photo of Ronald, that is the fact.

take www.quora.com for instance ( a question and answer website) but yet they have higher page rank than bigger website with lots of large articles. take NL also, have seen a lot of short article in fact question but still yet get ranked. what Google cares is correct keywords,tags and users reactions.

to be honest have Google around uncountable times and i can count how many times have seen post from articles directories which is filled with long articles. and many people wast their time submitting articles to those website hoping they will rank first page but forgetting their articles will be regarded as duplicate content because so many people if not thousand will copy that articles to their blogs. Google cant detect the right author of an articles unless you have a Google authorship website. other people will take your credit and keep you hoping you will have good back links.

keep your self updated because i will post next time how to get a Google authorship website

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