If you are into digital marketing, you might have heard the phrase ‘Thin Content’ many times. Most businesses refrain from it as they don’t want Google to penalize their website.
11 years back, Google rolled out its Panda update that aimed at improving the content quality all over the search engine. This update was to reward the websites with high-quality content and penalize the ones having lower-quality content floating around.
The Panda update came along with a lot of hassle for the SEOs and digital marketers. The ranking of hundreds of websites was dropped just due to it. It took businesses and individuals a few months to completely recover from its adverse impact.
But the good news was the Black Hat SEO practices were halted up to a great extent. Google aimed to only let quality blog posts and articles remain on its platform and the tech giant actually succeeded in it.
It is then, that the term thin content was coined for the first time ever, if I am not wrong!
Although, it never impacted the ranking for my websites that were up and running, back then. I was zealous enough from the very initial phase of my career to providing only premium-quality content to my readers.
Over the last decade (2010 – 2020), Google and other major search engines have been bombarded with content. Most of the content is spammy which is disposed of by the search engines. Means, they never get any ranking in the future!
However, the list of well-written and relevant content is also massive. And that is the zone where the war is always on, war to rank on the first page of search engines!
In this post, I will walk you through thin content: What it is? Why it can crush your marketing campaigns? And at last, how to fix thin content to improve SEO?
What is Thin Content?
Google is a query and intent-based search engine. When a user enters a query in the search box, there is the intent behind it. Google collects data, analyzes it, checks its database, and displays results on the SERP (search engine result pages) based on that particular search query. This entire process is so fast that it takes only a few milliseconds.
If the search query tells Google that the user is searching for extensive information, Google ranks high quality content that is long enough to satisfy the user’s hunger. The content length for good long content is a minimum of 1000 words. If it could go beyond it, it is even better!
Thin content is an on-page set of written words which is of poor quality or offers little or zero value to the reader. Google does not rank such content as it values the interest of readers more than anything.
However, there have been instances when thin content (approx. 500 words) has been ranked on the first page of Google. Now, you might be thinking, what the heck is that?
As I have already told you that Google ranks websites based on search intent. The thin content which is ranked by Google might be meeting a particular search intent while the long content with 1500 or 2000 words is simply skipping.
For example, for the search query – how to make tea? Do you think that Google will rank a 2000-worded article? No! For such search intent, Google thinks a post of not more than 500 or 600 words, for that matter, will do the job for the user. It is as simple as that!
Why does Thin Content Matter for Your Business?
Whether you are into a service-based or product-centered business, you must be having a website. Now, when it comes to ranking it on Google, what do you need in the first place? Yes, you need some good-quality content!
Most of the time, thin content is considered bad by the search engine, unless it is precisely fulfilling search intent. Therefore, if your business website has a good number of thin content published on it, you should consider altering it right away.
A good piece of content that helps a website rank on Google encompasses everything the user is looking for. Moreover, the content should include what a user might like to read after reading what he (she) was looking for online. This way, the average time spent by visitors on the website increases which further improves the SEO.
If your site hosts tons of thin content, your site will never rank and you won’t be able to leverage the millions of organic traffic that you could do otherwise. And you might be aware of the fact that no traffic means no leads and no leads means zero revenue generation.
So, I hope that you will work hard to improve the quality of your website content, if it exists.
What are the Types of Thin Content?
Google Panda has the charge to analyze and evaluate whether the content on your site is thin or not. Any time, if Panda detects thin content, it will penalize you by lowering your ranking.
4 Different Types of Thin Content that Google Recognizes:
- Duplicate Content: You should strictly avoid this type of thin content as it will not only hamper your site performance but you can also get blocked by the world’s largest search engine. Going with the name, duplicate means to copy a piece of content that already exists on another website. Never do it if you want to grow your business.
- Automatically Generated Content: Some AI tools are available online that spin original content by replacing some words with their synonyms. Although, the machine-generated content passes most of the plagiarism tests. But Google Panda – the boss, detects it. I believe you know the story that goes further!
- Doorways Page: Doorways pages are the pages that use camouflaged 301 redirects to take a user from one web page to another without their permission. Usually, such kind of content is used for spamming people around the world.
- Pages Exceeding Advertisements: People come to Google to gain some knowledge, to know about things that they are fervent to know. In such a case, if you will show them less content and more advertisements. How could you think Panda will not penalize you? You will be penalized and all your rankings will go down the gutter.
How Thin Content will Damage Your SEO Marketing Campaigns?
To market your business over the internet, majorly there are two proven ways. The first way is through paid advertisements which could cost you an arm and a leg.
But the second way which includes driving organic traffic to your site through SEO (search engine optimization) is a cost-efficient method.
One of the best things about SEO is that it could bring you any amount of traffic that too without disturbing your other channels of marketing (like PPC, Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing).
Suppose, you are doing SEO to get a ranking for a keyword but you are not getting the desired rank even after trying hard consistently. You can do an experiment – run a Google Ads PPC campaign for that keyword.
When Google will notice a sudden spike in traffic on your site for that particular keyword, the search engine will automatically improve your ranking, provided your content is well-optimized as per the SEO guidelines.
I am not saying that you will get a first-page ranking, but the ranking of your site will definitely rally up. It is anytime better than staying in the same position for months.
Now, let’s come back to the main topic of this post.
How thin content will destroy your SEO marketing campaign?
If you are using thin content on your site two things will surface – first, you will not get any rank even in the top 100s on Google and second, you cannot incentivize any of your PPC campaigns to further perk up your ranking.
SEO works wonders when it is accompanied by other methodologies of marketing. Whatever your traffic source is, if relevant and quality traffic is getting on your site and they all are engaging with your content, Google will still boost your position on the SERP (search engine result page). But for that, you first need to ensure that there is no thin content on your website.
Therefore, if you have a bundle of thin content on your site, it is only going to prove gloomy for your future online marketing campaigns, be it organic or paid.
When you are doing things that Google never approves of, how could you become the apple of Google’s eye? You will never be! Hence, it is paramount for your business to completely eradicate the term thin content from your vocabulary.
How to Fix Thin Content Problem to Grow Your Business?
Many business owners have asked me personally how to fix the thin content problem on their websites. What I always tell them, I will be discussing and adding a few more things to it for you.
I am assuming that you have figured out the thin content on your site. Now it is time to fix it to improve your site’s ranking and boost the organic reach.
There are four ways through which you could get rid of the thin content. I have explained each one of them below:
Expand the Content
When you know that you have a bunch of thin content that is restricting your site’s organic growth. What would you exactly do? If I would have been in your place I would expand the word count by adding the ideal content that aims at providing some valuable information to the reader.
However, never expand it just for the sake of expanding. Your website is not your diary, you can’t write just anything on it and expect people to like it in return. There has to be something wise and meaningful that you are adding to a thin content to make it reach the ideal length.
When you expand the content just for the sake of adding a few more words to it, your content takes the form of shallow content. It is even more alarming than the thin content. It could get your site blacklisted forever! I know you wouldn’t want it to happen anytime.
While expanding, if you are falling short of content, you can start writing on the sub-topics on which no one is writing. And even if people are writing, that sort of content is just very less to satisfy the reader’s hunger. Therefore, if you want to improve the thin website content just know these two things.
First, only write what your audience is searching for and likes to read. Second, write what your audience will also like to read apart from the main topic. This way you will be able to add more quality content to your website and the thin content problem will be resolved without you putting in some extra effort.
Remove the Content
A huge percentage of thin content available online is horrible to read. You can understand completely what the writer is willing to say through his (her) words. Such content is shallow content that is also thin and is not at all offer anything that the visitors would like to ponder upon.
Shallow content will never give you the ranking you desire to gain on Google or any other search engine. In fact, it will encourage Google to forget its identity forever. If you don’t want to be dragged into the mire, you should never engage in shallow content.
But if you have already posted thin and shallow content on your site. The best way to fix it is by removing it completely. On the other hand, when you have the same content posted on two different posts on your site that is also not acceptable. It won’t make a good impression on Google.
You should also remove the duplicate content even if it is good to read. In order to remove duplicate content, the best practice is to see which page or post is getting more traffic on Google Analytics. The post with less traffic should be removed while the post which is attracting more visitors should remain as it is.
Replace the Content
You will find all kinds of content on the internet. Some of them are of superior quality, some are average and some are very poor. If your website content falls under the third category you should only consider replacing it.
Replacing poor-quality content comes with its own benefits. You don’t have to edit or add to the existing content. When you are replacing it with a freshly written meaningful piece of content you are making sure that the new content has everything that the older one missed.
While writing a new one to replace the older post, you have the freedom to write it without worrying much about the previous poorly written content. You don’t have to bear the burden of it when creating another from scratch.
Just remember to redirect the URL of the old post to the URL of the new content. If you skip this, it may show a 404 error and search engines don’t like such errors on websites.
Rewrite the Content
Thin content can be fixed by rewriting the content. You need to figure out those shallow areas where you need to add some quality word flow in order to make it readable or understandable for your online readers. If your content is missing some thoughtful points that you think would help your audience, you should definitely add or rewrite them.
A thin content that is of poor quality doesn’t actually explain the topic to the core. Such content will never be picked up by Google. If you want your content to get the desired ranking on the SERP, you should know only bear one thing while writing –the quality.
There are possibilities that the thin content contains wrong spellings, or incorrect grammar, which is something that search engines will never digest. Hence, rewriting such content with proper explanations is one of the keys to fixing the thin content.
I hope that you have now understood how to fix the thin content issue of your website.
To Conclude:
It is the truth that thin content will crush all your efforts to market your business website and reach the target audience the organic way. The only way to get rid of it is by replacing it with something valuable or meaningful. It could be done either by rewriting it or expanding the length of the same content.
I have never come across a situation where Google Panda has penalized my website due to its content. From the beginning, I have focused on creating quality content that is liked by all of my site visitors.
If your approach while writing will be to market your business, you will never be able to write content that generates leads. If you want the content to come out worth converting the online visitors, then you need to change your approach. Your approach should be to provide something worth shareable with your audience. Then thin content penalties won’t even haunt you in your dreams.
