In modern marketing, your website should play a significant role in bringing in new customers. While dealing with your website and search engines, you may have come across the term ‘thin content’. This refers to website content that is not good enough to satisfy the searcher’s intent, and you need to get rid of it.
Some characteristics of thin content are brevity, shallowness, duplication of existing content, and low quality. The main problem with thin content is that it does not rank well in Google Search and can increase your website’s bounce rate.
So, what should you do with thin website content? Should it be made longer? Will that bore the reader? Or should you split a longer piece of content into multiple pieces? Or will this result in even more thin content?
Let’s find out how to deal with thin content.
According to Google, thin content is web page content that has little or no value to visitors. Here, the quantity and quality of the page’s content are not satisfactory.
Thin content includes web-pages that are directly copied from a retailer or manufacturer and contains no additional information. They also include reviews that only contain product summaries.
One significant quality of thin content is that it lacks originality and barely adds value to the user’s search intent. That is the main reason why it is bad for SEO, because if you give users a subpar experience, naturally, your rankings will suffer. Your website’s thin content forces your readers to look for another resource to answer their question. Pages with thin content bring down your website’s authority in the eyes of consumers. This can negatively impact your site both in the short and long term, as dissatisfied prospects are less likely to return and do business with you.
To solve this issue, you first need to identify thin content on your website. Determine whether you can utilize it in another way. Otherwise, completely useless pages, like old blog tags, can be easily deleted and redirected. By doing this, it tells Google that your website is well-maintained rather than accumulating broken 404 links and squandering your crawl budget.
Finally, if some of your thin pages have topical overlap, the quality of the page can then be improved by combining them into a single resource.
So, before you do anything else, identify thin content.
One common question businesspeople have is whether splitting up a long article into multiple shorter articles will result in thin content. Google Search Console can be used to identify thin content and see how the search engine views your website. A blog or landing page that was supposed to rank but does not may indicate that the content is thin. These red flags can help you identify thin content:
Once you know the red flags that indicate thin content, you have an idea of what not to do with your web pages.
So, when creating content for your website, you have to show that you are a real company or brand to create trust and an authoritative brand persona. If you have a long article you are concerned readers may find it boring, or think splitting it into multiple articles will turn them all into thin content, wait. First, check whether it contains any of the characteristics of thin content. If you find any, thin content can be fixed at two levels: the site level and the page level.
Spammers and thin content don’t create unnecessary system pages. So, if you want to establish authority and trust, add system pages like About Us, Privacy Policy, location and service pages, contact pages, an FAQ, and testimonials. The additional content and value can make your site look more legitimate to Google.
Contact information, internal and external links, social media links, trust badges, SSL security, or any tangible signs are all trust elements that can attest to your website’s validity.
Earlier websites used to take a long piece of content and break it up into many pages. They would then layer the page with multiple ads so that to read the whole content you had to click through every single page, viewing dozens of ads along the way. It was not a fun experience, so try to avoid that practice.
Rather, you can accumulate information from all these pages to create a single, more cohesive and authoritative piece of content. This strategy was primarily developed for pages with a modest amount of content. If you have a large resource where each page is valuable in and of itself, you can continue using this pagination.
This is especially relevant to the Google Panda update, as it mostly targets thin, duplicate content. If you want your website to top search engine result pages, you have to replace duplicate content with high-quality content that satisfies the user’s intent.
Original content is an excellent way to impress Google’s algorithm and establish authority to potential prospects. But you don’t always have to come up with completely new ideas on the subject.
Simply presenting information better than your competition and making it more useful to readers is enough to make your content original. Some topics have an abundance of information already available; others have little to none, especially in a simple and appealing format. The latter are the best pages to optimize, and you can certainly rank well for them.
Thin content is bad for your website. No matter whether you are writing long-form content or splitting a long article into multiple ones, you must provide original, high-quality, SEO-optimized content to rank high on Google. If you are facing content issues on your digital marketing journey, you can contact G Web Pro to get the most effective solution.