Welcome to this new post of Innovadeluxe, this time I want to talk about thin content in SEO, in addition to its importance and how it can affect the organic positioning of your website.
First a brief introduction: the content is one of the pillars of SEO of any website, because at the end of the day, we’re positioning keywords that are in that content.
In addition, in recent times Google keeps repeating the vital importance of content in order to give the user the best experience, as well as in every update. But even with this info, it’s very common to venture down the simplest path, plaguing the website of thin content.
At Innovadeluxe we know that when you go the easy way regarding SEO, it can cause great disadvantages in a website, as it usually focuses on unethical techniques such as plagiarism of content or some black hat techniques.
On the other hand, Google has already taken measures in the means of content, with the creation of the Google Panda algorithm in 2011, which is in charge of pursuing and penalizing all these practices, hindering the search results in the SERPs and consequently, the SEO positioning.
So be careful with your content strategy to position your website. One of the things to avoid and take into account is the thin content, which is, finally, what I want to talk to you about.
Table of contents
Definition of Thin Content for SEO
When we talk about thin content, we refer to landings, pages or URLs of a website, which have poor or low quality content. Generally or more commonly, this is interpreted as scarce content, but the truth is that there are many factors, and it relates more to the quality of content than anything else.
Let me explain with an example. A page can have a content of about 150 words, which is scarce, but in does respond clearly the search intentions and expectations of the users, so it wouldn’t be considered as low quality.
So in truth, a good definition of thin content is one that doesn’t provide what users need and therefore, doesn’t meet their expectations.
Why is thin content important for SEO?
So thin content can be scarce content, ie less than 500 words, and/or low quality content for the user, but this won’t penalize if it only happens in a couple or pages. What I mean is, the problem occurs when a website has a much higher percentage of poor quality content in relation to its quality content.
This is closely related to the time that Google spends crawling our website, or what we call the Crawl budget, and in this sense we could see a negative effect on organic positioning (SEO).
How? Well, when the Google crawlers come across a page that they consider to have poor quality content, they’ll reduce their crawl frequency, which affects the SEO of the website in a very negative way.
Thus, we have to focus our efforts on detecting this thin content and fix it, trying to ensure that the ratio between poor quality content and good quality content doesn’t work against us.
Next, we’re going to see the types of thin content, to help us detect it correctly.
Types of Thin Content on a website
Let’s see the fundamental cases that are most repeated on any website, pay attention.
Automatically generated content
This type of content is the one that the Google Panda algorithm detects with greater simplicity or ease, since in all cases there’s evidence or proof that the content has been generated by automation tools. Let me explain with some examples.
- Content generated by tools for article spinning, rewriting texts, etc. The use of these tools can provide us with different texts and all of them can be of quality, but as their use increases, the likelihood that the web is filled with similar texts increases as well. And Goole Panda will notice.
- Automatic translations that leave sentences without any sense, by translating it literally from one language to another, for example.
- The massive import of product content by CSV from suppliers to an E-commerce. If we think about it, these texts will be identical in all those virtual stores that opt for this option.
Duplicate content or plagiarism
This is one of the most popular cases, one could say that it’s actually a classic when it comes to thin content in SEO.
To make it clear from the beginning, a website with stolen or duplicate content from other similar websites is not going to bring you anything good in terms of organic positioning or SEO.
This type of pages can be positioned, yes, but in a much more expensive way, since Google crawlers interpret that the content copied from other websites doesn’t make much sense and of course, it doesn’t provide value to the user.
If one of the Google bots finds two pages with the same content or very similar, in a way it recognizes it as a duplicate, it will position only one of them. If there are several websites with duplicate content, the older content will prevail.
In addition, I imagine you’ve already thought about it, but the plagiarized or stolen content from other websites not only can bring us problems with Google, but also with the original creators of such content, whom can take legal action against the website that has stolen the content.
What SEOs call Doorways or Backdoors
First of all, this type of thin content is practically no longer used, as Google pursued it very hard and became very strict in this aspect.
It’s based on the creation of landings pages whose sole purpose is to capture organic traffic, so that long tail keywords are used indiscriminately, with the intention of “capturing” and redirecting users to another website.
They’re usually landing pages with very little content that adds no value nor it is real, since its only purpose as I said, is to redirect traffic.
How to solve Thin Content
The answer that we like most in the world of SEO is ‘it depends’, and in this case is no different. It depends on each URL or case.
URLs with content that doesn’t add value to SEO, as it’s the same or extremely similar to some in any other website, – such as cookies or privacy policy, – have usually included a noindex tag in the HTML head. So the solution is to prevent Google bots from even crawling these types of URLs.
If the case of a URL that in principle we want to position or is attracting organic traffic, the right thing to do is to adapt or rewrite the text to give it the quality it needs, making it of value for both, the user and Google.
This work will help you to position for new keywords for each landing and of course, generate greater visibility in relation to the increase of clicks and impressions.
Finally, if you have duplicate, poor or automatically generated content and it isn’t generating any organic traffic, the right thing to do is to remove it through Google Search Console, for instance, so it won’t be detected by Google bots and penalize the website or at least have any negative consequences.
Benefits of quality content for Google
Also, I want to talk about the benefits of quality content for organic positioning. As I said, the content is one of the fundamental aspects or pillars of SEO and organic positioning for any website, so it has to be of quality for both, the user and of course, for Google.
- With quality content we can start positioning for new main keywords and related ones, so that we cover the correct search intent of users for each query. This is achieved by including new texts or improving the existing ones with a greater semantic variety.
- When we provide users with quality content, it’s users value it very positively, so this improves brand image and eventually visibility in search results.
- Reduce the bounce rate. If the content is of quality, it means that among other aspects, it covers perfectly well the search intention of potential users for each landing, so the information that each user is looking for, will be displayed and this will increase the CTR and reduce the bounce rate.
- Surpass our competitors. It’s important to communicate to your users and potential customers the quality of your product or service ahead of your competition. This can be done through relevant publications, so that both Google bots and users take notice of this.
- Become a reference in our sector or market niche. In this sense, it’s very relevant the implementation of a blog, where you can publish content that provides the information needed by users, based on keywords that correctly cover the search intention of our potential customers.
Conclusions
We already know that content is one of the pillars of organic positioning for any website, whether selling products online or services or an informative website.
In this post I wanted to explain what is thin content and how to correct it to have quality content that improves the SEO of your website.
The thin content is one of the factors that influence the content, but there are others to consider such as duplicate content.
If you have any questions or need clarification, I wait for you in the comments.
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