Thin Content in SEO: How to Identity and Fix It?

Content attains a major significance for various purposes – boosting page rankings, boosting SEO opportunities, increasing engagement, and many more. However, the performance of your content is completely based on its type, quality, relevance, and length as well.

In this post, we will understand what is thin content and its influence on SEO. While content is one of the most prioritized ranking factors according to Google, it is necessary to keep it clean, error-free, and detailed.

Before we delve deeper into identifying or fixing thin content, let’s understand it conceptually.

What is Thin Content?

Thin content is those pages that have no or very little value for users. Usually, it is shallow, structurally bad, or irrelevant to the user's query or intention. Most likely, it lacks in-depth, quality, and originality.

Most likely, thin content is produced when there is a need to quickly fill up a website or rank in the search engines with the usage of targeted keywords. On the other hand, this approach results in counter-productivity and harms search engine visibility for the website.

This is because search engines strongly favor content that makes sense, has value for the users, and answers all their questions. Thin content will then be punished since it draws very low rankings of any kind and less traffic to the website.

Whenever creating or re-creating content, ensure that it is both relevant and enlightening for your users. Giving out relevant information and answering user intent helps position your site better for getting authority and credibility, which in turn can lead to higher search rankings.

Types of Thin Content

It is clear that thin content is not good for SEO and organic rankings. But, which type of thin content hurts more? Let’s know these types:

1- Low-Quality Content

Low-quality content, otherwise known as thin content, is defined as web content that is irrelevant to user needs, either unsubstantial or unoriginal. It provides no value to visitors and hence adversely impacts a website's search engine ranking.

Here are some characteristics of low-quality content:

• Lacking depth: This is shallow content that doesn't explore the issue in depth or offer adequate coverage of the information involved. It would leave users always searching for more and disappointed at what they turn up from the search.
• Repetitive information: The common trait of low-quality content is identical or near-duplicate content on several pages. Search engines penalize websites with excessive duplicate content because it does not add any value to the user.
• Irrelevant content: That which does not align with the user's intent or address his needs is rated as low quality. The creation of on-point content that directly answers users' queries and offers solutions to their problems becomes very important.

Such content provides no value to users; on the contrary, it hurts search engine optimization on a website – whether you’re aiming for short-form or long-form content.

Therefore, with such stiff competition, priorities in content creation should shift to high-quality content that offers real value to the target audience.

2- Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to unique, relevant content pieces duplicated in more than one place on the internet. This includes the very same text, images, and even code on different pages of the exact same website or across several different websites.

Search engines recognize duplicate content as an indicator of thin or irrelevant content; it can negatively impact a website's search rankings. Many factors can contribute to duplicate content:

• Same content over multiple pages: This can be due to bad site structure, syndication, or even accidental copying.
• Content scraping: It occurs when certain mischievous sites steal content from another website without actually taking permission from the original site. This can cause serious problems in issues of duplicate content.
• Online print publications: At times, what happens is that these print publications get taken and put in electronic form without much formulation, thereby leading to duplicate content.
• E-commerce product descriptions: Too many e-commerce sites just use the manufacturers' descriptions of products, which can lead to identical content across multiple sites.
• URL variations: Different forms of a specific URL—for instance, with or without "www" or HTTP versus HTTPS—can be handled by search engines as duplicate content.

By knowing what problems may be checked for as duplicate content, site owners should be in a position to take appropriate action to identify and address them to more effectively see their site ranked in search engines.

3- Syndicated or Scraped Content

Syndicated/scraped content refers to content copied from another site without due authorization or attribution. Some might even call this practice content theft; it is very harmful to both the original content developer and the website involved in the act.

It is well known that search engines prioritize original content and even punish websites having a high degree of syndicated or scraped material. Moreover, the sites whose presence includes a lot of the syndicated content also tend to harm the reputation and trust of the website built with its audience.

Here are the factors contributing to the syndicated or scrapped content:

• Ease of copying: Availability of tools and technologies that make it easy to copy and paste content online.
• Solutions without original content: Scrape content due to a lack of resources or time to create original content.
• Lack of knowledge: The majority of people owning websites might not know the legal implications of copying content without permission.
• Profit motive: Some individuals or businesses may scrape content to create content farms or sell the stolen content.

The creation of unique content by investing in it helps to provide a better ranking in the search engines, enhance trust in their audience's eye, and develop authority.

4- Doorway or Low-quality Affiliate Pages

Admitted deceit such as doorway pages and thin affiliate pages is intended to manipulate the rankings. This type of page tends to focus more on being visible in a search engine than on providing any real value to its visitors.

• Doorway pages are landing pages that tend to target ranking well for a particular set of keywords but with little or no original content provided. The main goal for such types of pages is to channel the users through to another page, normally one containing commercial websites.
• Low-quality affiliate pages aim at products and services, the only promotion of which will be done with an affiliate link attached, not offering any significant information or value to the user.

Both of these are taken to be black hat SEO and can be punished with various degrees of severity from search engines. Search engines work to prioritize user experience and high-quality content, while these practices are in direct contrast to these goals.

5- Category, Tag, or Author Pages

Category, Tag, or Author Pages Category, tag, and author pages can be a part of thin content issues if they are not handled right. They serve the very necessary purpose of organization, but they will generally be pages with no, very little, or duplicated content.

Over time, they become a pile of low to no-value pages that work against a site within the site's structure along with SEO. The five factors that play a role in category, tag, and author page effectiveness are:

• Thin/duplicate content of low value and poor quality
• Page structural problems—irrelevant information misleads both users and search engines.
• Possibly poor use of internal linking, leading to navigation and findability problems by search engines.
• Poor keyword optimization—there’s a low likelihood your pages will be discovered/searched for by search engines.
• Too many category/tag pages lower the value of each page, making the navigation complex for the users.
• Inefficiently designed pages or poor organization can lead to a frustrating user experience and, consequently, higher bounce rates.

Website owners can improve the quality and effectiveness, resulting in better usability and search engine performance, of their category, tag, and author pages by improving these factors.

6- Overwhelming Ad Pages

Advertisements and pop-ups on a web page, when added in an excessive amount, will reduce the user experience to the worst level. This not only affects the user experience but will also impact the SEO ranking of the respective site.

Moreover, ad-blockers can always reduce user engagement with the main content, diminishing the potential of the page ranking.

• Too much ad density: Too many of the ads on a page make it look cluttered and distractive.
• Larger ad sizes: Very large-sized ads will block content and user interaction.
• Pop-up and interstitial ads: In-your-face ad formats such as these can break the user experience and prove to be a major frustration for visitors.
• Auto-playing video ads: This comes as a sure-shot way to irritate the maximum with data consumption in a spree.
• Slow page loads: The ads cause the pages to load slowly, therefore providing a poor user experience.
• Ad placement: Above the fold, or in content ads can highly decrease readability.

The site must not affect the experience of the users for fair advertisement and good search rankings.

Google Penalties for Thin Content

What has changed in Google's focus now lies in ensuring a better search experience for users. Its emphasis has been placed more on "helpful, reliable, people-first content" that is useful for users rather than on content meant specifically to rank well in search rankings.

According to the developers and creators, thin content is detectable and punished in two ways by Google:

• Algorithmic Detection: The algorithms used by Google in its Search are ever-evolving to detect low-quality content and change search rankings based on this.
• Manual Penalties: The worst cases will be manually penalized by Google for extremely thin websites or those that have ridiculously thin content.

Google devalues the content that:

• Targets search ranking instead of users' needs: Content designed and created for deceiving search engines rather than serving users.
• Lacks creativeness: No new information, no insight; it's flat.
• Has been copied or rewritten without value added: Straightforward plagiarizing or repurposing of material without adding value.
• Lacks authority: Information that denotes no authority or credibility on the subject matter is taken.

While Google algorithms are forever getting better, there is always some scope for manual penalties regarding thin content in extreme cases.

How Thin Content Affects SEO?

Knowing the definition of thin content is not sufficient without knowing the reasons that make it bad for SEO. Thin content hurts your SEO in many ways:

• Absence of backlinks: Backlinks are a very important signal for good, informative content since other sites want to link with such valuable content. Contrarily, thin content is low on the value and hardly gains any share or link. With backlinks being such an influential signal, thin content will bring down your kill-every-SEO-strategy efforts.
• Unhappy readers: Thin content does not serve user needs, hence poor user experience. Unhappy readers will bounce off the website, which will indicate to search engines that the website is irrelevant or unhelpful.
• Keyword cannibalization: Too many thin pages target the same keywords, leaving search engines in a dilemma about which page to rank. This can siphon your website's authority and be harmful to your website's ranking for the target keywords.
• Poorly-backed organization: Thin content is often a reflection of poor website structure and organization. Search engines heavily depend on clear website architecture to effectively crawl and index content.
• High bounce rates: As also indicated before, thin content often manifests itself in high bounce rates, meaning users get off your website scarcely after alighting. It is a negative signal to searchers.

In short, thin content leads to a chain reaction of all kinds of badness for your SEO. A quality, value-offering, and user-oriented content source from you can help clean this stuff up quite nicely and better the performance of the website in the totality.

How to Identify Thin Content?

It is possible to identify thin content manually, but doing so is extremely time-consuming to manage. This will detail five ways to find the thinnest and duplicate content issues.

1. Using Google Search Console

Another helpful tool in looking for thin content on your website would be Google Search Console. It provides how Google sees your site, specifically data that will help you point out things to fix.

This tool describes how Google understands and indexes your pages. Pay extra attention to the "Excluded" tab, which lists pages that Google has decided not to include in search results.

• Crawled – currently not indexed: The number of pages crawled by Google but not indexed yet.
• Duplicate without user-selected canonical: Pages that have content already existing on some other page and no canonical tag has been assigned.
• Duplicate; submitted URL not selected as canonical: Pages where the submitted canonical URL is different from what was chosen by Google.
• Google chose a different canonical than the user: Pages where Google picked another canonical URL as indicated.

Another very effective way to find thin content on your website is by looking at its performance. If you have blog posts or landing pages that should rank well for a certain number of keywords and they're not getting any traffic from search, then you know that content is thin or low quality.

2- Using Primary Keywords for Rank Tracking

Rank tracking is the process of monitoring rank positions for your website in SERP against specified keywords. You can track your primary keywords to find probable thin content pages on your website and understand an overview of the website's performance.

The following are some useful tips using keywords to track thin content:

• Keyword selection: Decide on those keywords that ideally explain the search intent of your target audience and closely relate to the content on your website.
• Keyword combinations: Monitoring of branded, short-tail, and long-tail keywords reveal the general trend of your website performance.
• Geographic targeting: If your business has a location, then track location-based keywords. This will serve to quantify your local search visibility.
• Competitor analysis: Tracking of keyword ranking of your competitors can help in finding any opportunities against them.
• Consistent monitoring: Keyword rankings have to be followed consistently to see a trend or fluctuation.
• Keyword grouping: Similar keywords should be grouped for performance analysis and spotting cannibalization issues.
• SERP analysis: Track search engine results pages. This helps in understanding the changes in search engines' algorithms and competitor changes.

You can do all these activities using a professional SEO tool like RanksPro. It provides an option to edit add or replace priority keywords for which you need to track the rank of your content.

Following these steps, you can effectively do keyword tracking for your website SEO strategy and hence achieve better search engine visibility – further removing or optimizing thin content.

3- Use a Website Crawler to Detect Duplicate Content

No matter what, a website crawler will always be required if you want the proper identification of thin and duplicate content. This tool cautiously crawls your website and matches the content between different pages in search of duplicity.

Some crucial tips that can help you detect duplicate content using website crawling are as follows:

• Plagiarism checks: Plagiarism checking tools can be run over specific pages or sections of content to check for originality. Less hard-hitting than website crawlers on the search function but can be helpful when running smaller, one-time checks.
• Regular crawls: Space out website crawls so that you can track the addition of new content for your website and flag up any duplicate issues.
• Tracking core content only: Target crawling only of those pages that consist of a lot of unique content, for example, blog posts or product descriptions.
• Content gap analysis: It entails the identification of duplicate content and, after identification, studying the duplicate content. The study shall lead to the merge, redirect, or removal of pages.
• Canonicalization: Use canonical tags to indicate to search engines a preferred version to avoid exact duplicate issues.

If you suspect in advance that some of your pages are thin, there are easier tools. You could just run something through a plagiarism checker and test your hypothesis.

4- Analyze URL parameters

If you’ve ever taken a look at the query string portion of a URL, which comes after the question mark sign (?), you’ll notice that it contains some smaller bits and pieces. In most cases, they do not make sense as compared to their counterparts found elsewhere.

Therefore, their absence does not affect how well the site ranks in search engines. For example, sites with Paginated pages indexed by Search engines could also arise from sorting choices, product filtering, or pagination.

Here are some effective ways to analyze URLs for thin content:

• Identifying parameter patterns: Open the URLs and check for common patterns such as sorting choices, filtering products, or pagination parameters.
• Plagiarism check: You can check content on pages with similar URLs to see if they have anything new to offer.
• Use inspection tools: URL structure analysis and finding out possible duplicate sources will be made easy using quite several tools made especially for it.
• Canonical tags implementation: Where suitable use canonical tags so that Google knows which version of the same thing is better suited for making pages particularly visible in search results.

By doing this carefully on your website’s URL parameters, you would easily detect and deal with cases of duplicate pages thereby improving its general performance in search engine optimization.

5- Search for Duplicate Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are summaries of what a page will be about that appear in search engine results pages. Although they do not change affect rankings, but very helpful in improving CTRs.

Having the same meta description on more than one URL keeps search engines from showing your pages and this hampers the growth of your website in various ways.

Here are some other drawbacks:

• Reduced CTRs: This will reduce the likelihood of a searcher clicking on your listing because chances are greater that search engines will display the same (or very similar) meta description for multiple pages.
• Brand identity: Search engine optimization relies quite a bit on meta descriptions for brand identity. Duplicates can widen this effect.
• Not good for human users: Humans use meta descriptions to decide what the content of a page is about. Duplication Adds No Value and Will Frustrate Users.

It is possible to get unique and attractive meta descriptions that do wonders in increasing the CTR for your website assisting its overall search engine performance.

Tips to Fix Thin Content

Once you have detected thin content on your site, the next critical step will be to fix these issues. The following are some effective ways to optimize thin content:

1. De-duplication or Removal of Copied Content

Whenever a page has little value for readers, usually the best is to just delete it. This works especially well for doorway pages, or multiple blog posts, all trying to target the same keyword. You can further help to clean up the structure of your site to optimize the performance of your site.

2. Expand Existing Content

If a page lacks depth or detail, adding more relevant information can turn it from thin to valuable content. Providing more informative content can make the user experience better and hence make the page more ranking-likely.

3. Combine Redundant Content

If several of your pages are talking about the same content, it's better to consolidate such pages into one full-page content. Doing this with spare you the trouble of duplicate content and put more structure to your site.

4. Rewrite and Optimize Content

It is useful to re-write such a page in the case that it's outdated or doesn't serve the search intent of customers at the moment. By updating content with applicable keywords and reorganizing it, you add value to it and thus the potential for better ranking.

Track Thin Content with RanksPro

Thin content, which is content that lacks interest, originality, or relevance, is really dangerous for a website's search engine optimization. Now that you can recognize thin content in all its forms, you will be well on board to quickly note and fix problems.

Tools such as Google Search Console and website crawlers can be leveraged to uncover otherwise hidden thin content problems. Closely monitor the trends of keyword rankings and URL parameters in search of clues on how healthy your website is.

RanksPro packs the complete toolkit to arm you with the kind of visibility to identify, analyze, and resolve thin content problems. Among the features are:

• Website auditing
• Keyword rank tracking
• Competitor analysis

RanksPro empowers you with the ability to set your website up for SEO and deliver great user experiences. Keep in mind that thin content elimination is a process. It involves regular website audits and updating the content to ensure one has a healthy and high-performance website.