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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
The site must not affect the experience of the users for fair advertisement and good search rankings.
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:
Google devalues the content that:
While Google algorithms are forever getting better, there is always some scope for manual penalties regarding thin content in extreme cases.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.