The Types of Thin Content and What You Should Watch Out For
When I was a child, and I had permission to use one of those big boxes called computers, I liked to explore the web.
I searched for answers to the most important questions a ten-year-old can ask herself. But I was always on the edge of my seat when clicking a link.
I knew, from experience, there were some pages that would redirect me to another page that had nothing to do with what I was searching for. And little me always tried to click the back button before the redirect kicked in.
It’s no surprise that I failed every time. But today, to my relief and the next generation’s, I don’t have to deal with that anymore.
Thanks to the Panda algorithm that Google uses. Thin content has been kept from appearing on the first page of search results. And now, SEO’s are interested in getting rid of thin content for good.
But, what is considered thin content in SEO? And how you make sure you don’t get a thin content penalty?
Well, I wrote a robust guide on thin content, so let’s see.
What Is Thin Content in SEO?
Thin content is content — within thin pages — that has little or no added value to the user's experience. This translates into providing low-quality content to your visitors, and as a result not satisfying their search intent.
If you don’t want to hurt your SEO, avoid creating pages with no useful or unique content. Google’s Panda algorithm targets thin pages and penalizes thin websites according to webmaster quality guidelines.
Google is all about making its users happy. So, let’s see the type of thin content pages you should avoid.
Types of Thin Content and What They Mean for Your SEO
As content that adds no value has a broad definition, we’ll go through the types of thin content and how it can hurt your SEO.
So, what is considered thin content in SEO?
Auto-Generated Content
Automatically generated content is easy to recognize as it’s poorly written and difficult to understand. It’s also called “spun content” as it comes out of a machine.
As this is a technique to get fast and cheap content, some websites use it. They have the wrong impression that if they fill their website with lots of content — regardless of the quality — it will help them rank higher on Google.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
When your visitors land on your page, don’t see the information they’re looking for and on top of that the content makes their eyes bleed, they’ll just bounce out. And this will tell Google that your content has no value to the search query affecting your rank.
Duplicate Content
Sometimes called thin syndicalization or scraped content. There are a lot of things that can be considered duplicate content, but I like to separate it this way:
Blocks of content that completely match each other with very little changes
Two entire web pages with the same content
If your visitors constantly see the same information across pages, they may get frustrated. You’re not offering something new or unique that can interest your audience. So, this falls into giving a bad user experience.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
These practices are considered an attempt to manipulate search engines and get more traffic. Some people think that if one of their pages is doing good with CTR, permanence on the page, low bounce rates, and other SEO metrics, a duplicate page will help the site rank higher.
Google penalizes these sites by lowering their rank and, in some cases, removing them from search results.
Low Content and Lots of Ads
Have you been to a page with lots of ads that make navigation difficult? Making you click the X button repeatedly? And not only that, but new ads pop up from time to time?
Well, that’s another type of thin content.
It’s okay to use ads, but when there are more ads than content on your page it’s annoying to your visitors. Experts suggest a healthy ratio is 30% of ads and 70% of content.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
By putting yourself in the shoes of your visitors you can already know why. When visitors encounter ads over and over again they bounce out of these websites in frustration. And this is especially true when these ads are difficult to close. There’s no need to say Google also hates this.
No Content
There’s a reason why Google loves pages with lots of content — and people too. When you’re looking for something, you want information, and a page with no content or very little content doesn’t tell you much.
The minimum content of a webpage, whatever it’s about, should have a minimum of 300 words. Anything less could leave your audience and Google wondering what your page is about.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
When Google bots are crawling your website they analyze all the content and data on each page. While analyzing your webpage they determine what it’s about, and what topic it should rank for. If there’s not enough information this can be considered thin content and it’s going to be difficult for you to rank for the keyword you’re targeting.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are pages that use redirects with malicious intent. A doorway works by showing a search result with a good rank, but when clicked on, it redirects to a different page — usually a page with a lower rank.
(Yes, this is from my origin story)
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
Simply because you’re not giving your visitors what you “promised”. They’re clicking into a page expecting something and in return, they get another thing completely different. This counts as deceiving your visitors and so, it violates Google’s webmaster guidelines. As a result, your site might no longer appear on search results.
Thin Affiliates
If your website participates in affiliate programs, solving this should be a priority. Usually, affiliate websites copy and paste product descriptions from the original vendor into their pages. And that's it, no more content.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
This approach, as you may already guess, means the website is not providing any added value to the user experience. There's no additional information about the price, features, or even reviews. And these types of sites don't perform well in the Google search results.
Squeeze Pages With Bad Practices
Squeeze pages are a type of landing page that has the purpose of “squeezing” something, most of the time an email address, from your visitors.
Now, some might think that as landing pages' main purpose is to drive your visitors to take action, it’s okay to flood them with ads, “buy now” buttons, and forms. But this also violates guidelines for thin content. Google doesn’t like pages with poor user experience. It also wants you to give the option to your visitors to explore your site.
Why Does It Hurt Your SEO?
These types of squeeze pages don’t offer value to your visitors as they’re not giving them options. Options to learn more. Options to try for free. Or options to check on resources. And the poor navigation, lots of ads and buttons don’t help. Naturally, this is considered thin content, and it will affect your ranking.
How to Find Thin Content
Now, before fixing thin content, you have to find it. And yes, you already know what it looks like. But if you have a website with more than 100 web pages, finding thin content becomes overwhelming.
So first, let's find thin content the easy way.
Screaming Frog:
You can use a web crawler like Screaming Frog to do a complete analysis of your website. They offer a free version that scans 500 links — or web pages. So, if your website isn’t that big yet you can use their software for free.
For this example, I used the free version on the website of quetext.com. When I filter the overview from the window of content, it shows results for duplicate content, low content, and spelling and grammar errors.
There are 19 pages with low content on quetext.com. And this software shows you which ones and their actual word count.
Screaming Frog also gives you insights into your site structure and metadata. So, it’s a good tool to go to when you want to find any thin content.
SEMrush Site Audit:
Another option for finding thin content is by using SEMrush on-page checker feature.
This SEMrush feature gives you an analysis of all the SEO on-page issues, as well as ideas on how to improve your pages.
Google Analytics:
You can use Google Analytics to refine your search and see the metrics of your content pages.
This gives you insights on where to focus your efforts for the pages that are doing great. And where do you need some improvements for pages with not a good performance.
How to Fix Thin Content [Actionable Tips]
After learning how thin content can affect your SEO and how to find thin content, just one question lingers. How can you fix thin content?
But fear not. I'll show you some actionable tips so you know exactly what to do.
There are three ways to overcome thin content:
Upgrade existing thin content
Remove thin content
Write unique pieces from scratch
Let's see these three options more closely.
1. Remove Thin Content
First, you have to start by removing all content that provides no value at all. That means removing all duplicate or scraped content as well as doorway pages.
For duplicate content:
As duplicate content is just copies of content from other pages, when Google finds duplicates, it doesn’t know how to rank them. So, it’ll usually result in Google giving priority to the site that published the content first and penalizing the duplicate.
REMOVE THEM.
(it’s for your own good)
For doorway pages:
These ones are just deceiving your visitors.
MUST REMOVE.
Debug content that does you no good.
2. Upgrade Existing Thin Content
After removing duplicates and doorway pages, you have to figure out what is still valuable from your remaining thin content.
For auto-generated content:
If the content that you have is automatically generated, but it contains value, like it solves a question or explains something, you can repurpose it. This means you can use the central topic from the content to create new content, keeping the important stuff in there, but with high editing and writing.
This isn’t about leaving some lines of text as it is, it’s about keeping the same idea, but writing and editing from zero.
For low content and lots of ads:
Let’s say you have a blog post with too many ads and low content. But you see this post has really good SEO metrics, the bounce rate is low and the permanence in the page is good. Then, it means your content is good and some visitors bear the ads just to read it.
What you have to do here is lower the number of ads. Remember the 30% ads, 70% content ratio? Another good practice is to put 3 ads per page.
For no content:
For no content or very low content, think what’s the purpose of that web page. If the purpose was to make people click on a link, create content around it about how clicking said link is going to help them solve X problem. Or what’s in it for them by clicking on it.
Give your visitors information.
For thin affiliates:
Being in an affiliate program is okay, the thing is you shouldn’t just copy and paste product descriptions and that’s it. A smart way to overcome this is to do an article review of the product, a comparison between different products, or a top list of products you consider good.
This gives value to your audience as you’re giving information about the product from your experience. And as a result, your visitors have a better understanding of what product to buy (lots of value).
For squeeze pages:
Don’t fill these landing pages with promotional objects like ads, a lot of call-to-action buttons, and forms. You’re going to end up stressing out your visitors. My advice here is that you concentrate on giving your audience information as well as options to explore. Think about the things they want to know or resources that can help them make a choice.
Now, you already know a healthy ratio for ads. But when you ask how many CTA’s are too many? The answer is: there’s not an exact number.
Here, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors, re-read and realize when it’s too much.
Pro Tip: Before replacing pages with valuable content, make sure you use a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect helps you avoid losing backlinks from the content you intend to replace.
3. Write Unique Pieces From Scratch
Finally, after you’ve finished debugging and transforming thin content into something valuable, you have to make sure you don’t have to do it again.
As posting content regularly is important to improve your SEO you have to make sure you’re not posting thin content anymore. The best advice for this is to write unique pieces from scratch either by you or by hiring somebody to do it.
Some people think that there’s no way to write original content anymore as all topics are already covered. But it’s possible, you have to look at the problem or topic from a different perspective or from your own experience.
If you want to talk about something, do research, collect data, analyze it and share what you learned. You can also give your opinion about a technique or product from your experience. The important thing here is to talk from a different angle.
To Wrap It Up
We’ve all heard the saying “content is king”, but if that’s true then “audience is god”.
All the content we write has one purpose, and it’s giving information to your audience. And this information must be valuable, otherwise, websites won’t have Google favoring them. We’re at a time when your audience’s voice isn’t just important but vital to your business.
There’s no way you would rank higher if you just write for search engines. But if you write for people. To help people. To solve people’s problems. Then you’re on the right track.
What’s your method to overcome thin content? Comment below and let me know.