What is Thin Content & How is it Affecting Your SEO?- Embtel

In: Content Marketing

Thin content is one of the first issues Google handled with its 2011 Panda algorithm update. “Content is king” remains the very cliche word in digital marketing, but there is a reason we are still discussing it. If your manufacturer does not release any original material, it is going to be impossible to break into valuable SERP’s for valuable keywords.

Learn about the aspects of your site at risk for thin content and find out how to address the root problem.

What is Thin Content?

According to Google, thin content is content that provides “no extra value.” Low excellent work includes pages with duplicate content, affiliate generated content, automatically generated articles, scraped content, and doorway pages. Work which falls under these categories will struggle to rank, and may also lead to a breach of Google Webmaster Guidelines.

If your work falls under any of the above categories, it is time to ramp up your efforts with greater topic thoughts and keyword study. Luckily, tools like ahrefs and Semrush exist to help you brainstorm and optimize content ideas.

Valuable Content is King

The trick to getting ranked in Google would be to write something precious and relevant to your audience. Your content needs to answer consumer queries and help your audience. Steer clear of content that’s thin, short, or does not fit the meta name and description fields.

How To Find Valuable Content Ideas

According to Statista, there are more than 4 million blogs posted online each and every day! With these odds, that radical content idea you simply came up with currently exists. Look toward effective sites for ideas and inspiration, but it’s important to create your own personal voice.

When it comes to writing for SEO, you do not need to reinvent the wheel but you do need to offer value that is not contained in previous posts on precisely the same subject. Find subjects people in your business care about and present this information within your own distinctive way.

Four Common Examples of Thin Content:

1. Automatically Generated Content

Automatically generated articles (auto-generated) are articles that that’s created by some form of an app. If auto-generated content manipulates search rankings and not help customers, Google can take action on such content. A complete example would be carrying a French press story and running it through a translator prior to adding it to your site.

Machine-generated content is not always viewed as a terrible thing in the eyes of Google. AI and machine learning started to enhance their content creation capabilities and there happen to be ‘robots’ creating content that is articles. Provided that the content is precious it will not fall into the class of thin content, but we still advise with a person edit your own auto-generated content.

2. Low-value affiliate content

Affiliate sites are not thought to be low quality by Google as long as the embedded hyperlinks are helpful to customers. Pages full of affiliate links and unrelated duplicate are prime goals for Google lookup penalties.

3. Content that is scraped (copied) from other sources

Scraping content is easy and is a tempting kind of low-hanging fruit for marketers. Direct plagiarizing may, sooner or later, create a fall in rankings from Google. Here are a few ways people scrape content:

Copy and pasting from articles you did not write
Only making minor tweaks from content stolen from other sources
Embed multiple content types that don’t add any extra value (infographics, videos, images…)
Using automated methods to re-tool content that exists externally, attempting to display this content as fresh.

4. Using ‘Doorway’ pages to trick Google

Google designates ‘doorway’ pages as low-quality content especially optimized for rank for specific keywords. These keywords provide a doorway between users as well as your articles. Based on Search Console Assist, “doorway pages are terrible for users since they result in multiple similar pages in user search outcomes, where each outcome ends up accepting the user to essentially the identical destination.”

Here are 3 common examples of doorway pages:

Multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page
Pages generated to funnel visitors into the actual usable or relevant portion of your site
Substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, browseable hierarchy.

5. Technical Issues That Cause Thin Content Content

Www. vs. non-www URL’s: If you have deviations of the same URL it can result in duplicate content problems. Therefore, you must choose only one version of the URL. For example, https://embtelsolutions.com vs https://www.embtelsolutions.com. You can also correct the issue by redirecting those URLs with a 301 redirect to the canonical version.

HTTP vs. HTTPs: Google places an extreme amount of value on boosting websites that are protected with https URLs vs. http URLs. To cure the problem, be certain that you put in a redirect rule in your own server that redirects all http webpages to the https canonical variation through 301s.

Mobile Sites: Mobile sites are a lasting fashion within digital marketing, but when set up incorrectly, they could cause content problems that can kill your positions. Insert meta tags into the cellular version of your web site that points back to the desktop version.

Print Pages: A seemingly innocuous but damaging detail is such as printer-friendly pages that link from article or blog content. Once more, this may result in a situation of duplicate content.