Many people have also bought The Brooklyn Bridge.

Paul

We don't always see eye to eye but I totally agree with this comment.

This forum is obsessed with articles and I have no doubt that started with EZA (ezinarticles) years ago when the fad was spamming that domain for followed backlinks, well, Google caught on & shut that junk down. Old habits are hard to break.

Viral sites like I Can Has Cheezburger? - Funny Animal Pics, Gifs and Videos - funny pictures - Cheezburger are excellent examples of this. Some of the pages rank quite well and the only relevant text is the h1/title.

It's not just these forums, but I think people completely miss the point. There's plenty of content marketers that are intentionally trying to overwhelm the user by having a massive wall of content. Many people (not me) will think "wow there's just so much information here" that they will end up sharing it or linking to it since they are too overwhelmed by the length to actually read the content.

There's obviously a big difference between perceived quality and real value. http://backlinko.com/conversion-rate-optimization is an excellent example of a post where there is so much content that it is basically a worthless post. Much of the information is conflicting, it does appear that Brian has made some improvements to that page, it was much worse before. Very simply put there's just way too much information, there's enough ideas there for about 150 split tests. So do I use a 1 step opt-in or a 2 step opt-in; if 1 is better, why is it suggested to use a 2 step? There's just extra information there to take up space.

With content length, the shoe has to fit. If it's a subject where there's a lot to discuss, then a long post makes sense. If it's a picture of a rabbit with a pancake on it's head, a 2000 word post probably doesn't fit.

Another great example where shorter content length is better is tech problems and solutions. Ok so Midori.exe is crashing, I want a solution, not a massive wall of text or endless pages of discussions about program features. (Try to find a solution via Google, I dare you, I gave up and uninstalled it.)