What Is Thin Content In SEO

Thin content, as the name suggests, is thin and doesn’t really have much impact. According to stateofdigital.com, thin content can be defined as content that has little value or no added value at all. This happens, when a page has at least one of the following problems:

Automatically generated content, meaning no human writer took time to research and write it. Some other points to avoid are:

• Duplicate Content
• Affiliate
• Scraped Content
• Doorway Pages

Sometimes, SEO webmasters refrain from using spammy techniques, but their content still falls under thin content category because their content doesn’t answer queries of the users. The content might be thin also because it is not relevant, too short and does not match the page title and the meta description of the page title. To make sure that you don’t have thin content, you need to analyze the content on your page. Go to – billlentis.com/what-is-career-in-seo.

Reading The Content

According to yoast.com, everyone should spend time reading the content on their website. They should focus on whether the content is relevant and if it is of quality or not. If the content is quality content, then it will answer the queries of the user and provide them with good information. You can write a 2,500 word article about thin content, but if it doesn’t even tell you what thin content is and what makes a content thin, then that article won’t be of any use.

Duplicate Content Is Thin Content

If you are not writing the content yourself, you can often find out that you could have duplicate content issues. To find out whether you have duplicate content, you can use Copyscape and Screaming Frog tools. If you have quality blogs, but also duplicate content, then you need to address this issue right away. Particularly, this can be a problem for news based organizations, that post more than a hundred stories on a monthly basis.

According to searchenginejournal.com, if you use Screaming Frog tool, then you will be able to check if there are any duplicate title tags, because these title tags would send the signal of duplicate content to search engines, affecting your ranking.

Photos And Videos

When there are photos and videos on a page, it can qualify as think content, because these photos and videos don’t usually have any text around them. The solution for this problem is to add content, that describes photos on every page, along with videos. You can also change the structure of your photo and video gallery, and use carousels to show users’ photos.

Comment Pagination Create A New URL

There are so many websites on WordPress and each of the websites allow a user to comment. If WordPress allows comment pagination, then whenever a comment is posted, a new URL is developed. Thus, if you have a website on WordPress, you should not allow comments pagination, and that you have included a canonical tag, which will direct the user to the URL of the article they are looking for.

Automatically Created Content

According to bruceclay.com, low quality content is often created by machines, and they don’t offer any value or offer limited value. The auto-generated content produced by machines, sometimes doesn’t make sense for humans. In order to avoid thin content, you need to give users quality content that answers their questions and information, that they will return to your website for.

For quality content, you should seek the services of a good writer who knows your website and company inside and out, and you ask them to produce content that answers questions that people post on different forums.

Affiliate Content

According to seopressor.com, the affiliated websites that are linked to websites, might provide the same information as the main website. Affiliate content is often used to get financial gains and drive traffic to a website; however, this can be bad for user experience, as it doesn’t give them anything valuable to read. This will come under thin content in SEO.

Scraping Content From Other Sources

Many websites scrape content; according to vertical-leap.uk, scraping content means the following things:

• A website is copy/pasting full articles that were not created by them
• A website has included external content to the website, without adding any value to it
• A website makes minor changes to the copied content and then posts it on their website
• A website using spinning software or articles to make content re-purposeful, so that the content becomes unique
• A website embeds content like videos, graphics and infographics, but doesn’t add anything of value

Google Panda Algorithm

The Google Panda algorithm was released with the purpose of giving low value to those websites, who public thin content, so that they don’t appear in search engine results. This algorithm filters content, by asking the four important questions below:

• Does the content show that it is written by an expert, shows any authority and can people trust it?
• When pages have titles like ‘Your Money or Your Life’, do they provide information that is needed or they leave out the important information?
• The content that is published, does it have any depth? Does it address the issues that are of importance and provide some value and thinking points to the readers?
• Can the content be accessed without using any VPN? Does the website have a site structure? Does the content load slowly or at a good speed? Does the content on the website opens in mobile devices as well?

Using Tools

In order to find thin content, you can use the following tools:
• Copyscape
• Google Search Operators
• Apollo Insights

Creating thin content, thinking that it will drive visitors to your website is wrong, because thin content only damages the reputation of your website and gives it a bad ranking in Google ranking. When you create thin content, then that doesn’t serve any value to the users and to know more about this, please watch this interesting and informative video: