There are many good reasons to commit to producing only quality content for your website.
Take care of your online image, do content marketing, rank well on search engines and even avoid algorithmic penalties. All these good reasons disappear when you are faced with “thin content”.
What is thin content?
In 2011, the advent of the Panda algorithm produced a real revolution in the standards that Google applied in evaluating content.
The new algorithm, in short, has set itself the goal of “cutting” all those sites that offer low or very low quality content, or that use Black Hat SEO techniques.
And it was with the Panda algorithm that we started talking about thin content.
So what exactly does thin content mean?
Thin content is low-quality content that does not benefit the user or the site on which it is published.
Examples of thin content
- Duplicate content
- A content obtained with scrapping techniques
- Too short and inconsistent content
- A doorway
- Self-generated content
- A worthless affiliate page
I think you already understand that such content is harmful to the site and the user. Not to mention the fact that you may receive a penalty called Google Thin Content Penalty
How to find thin content on your website
To identify thin content, you need to perform a comprehensive audit of the site.
Go to Google and use the “site:” operator (site: siteulmeu.ro) to get an idea of all the pages that have been indexed on the search engine.
Now you have to compare the list of pages obtained with:
- Google Analytics to understand if these pages bring traffic and what kind.
- The site owner (or you) to understand if these pages bring conversions and a possible ROI
SEO tools for identifying thin content
In addition to the Google Analytics mentioned above, there are other SEO tools to help you understand if your content is thin content.
- Copyscape is a “plagiarism” tool that can help you understand if yours is duplicate content (i.e. copied from another source).
- Screaming Frog. This tool can tell you how many words are in the content of a page to allow you to find a correlation between content that is too short and content that is too thin.
How to fix the thin content
Below I report all the cases of thin content that a content audit can highlight and what you should do in each case:
- Doorway: delete them without thinking twice.
- Duplicate content, auto-generated content, too short or inconsistent content: rewrite them.
- Low-value affiliate page: visit the affiliate’s website looking for valuable resources to enrich your page. These can be studies, research, but also multimedia content such as infographics or videos.
