With SEO, you need content to rank. Content that provides value. In other words, not “Thin Content”.
Thin Content doesn’t provide users with a good user experience. Search engines know this. And because of this, they don’t rank well let alone get indexed.
What is Thin Content?
Thin content is content on a web page with little to no value to the user. This can include low-quality content, low word count content, poorly written content, duplicate content, scraped content, and so forth.
Types of Thin Content
Commonly, “Thin” content makes SEOs think about word count. To solve it, they can just add more words. However, this isn’t how it works.
Thin content doesn’t only consider word count. It considers quality and user experience. Because of this, there are various types of thin content.
Low Word Count Content
Google ranks content that is informative, trustworthy, and helpful. This is otherwise known as E-E-A-T.
With low word count pages, they mostly don’t follow E-E-A-T. We’re talking about pages 300-400 words long or lower.
This is okay for some keywords and pages. However, for the most part, content should be much longer than this to provide a great user experience.
Unhelpful Content
Again, this falls under the E-E-A-T guidelines. Thin content could also be unhelpful content. Content that doesn’t help the user.
The best way to determine whether your content is unhelpful is by looking at what’s ranking on the SERPs. See what the top 3 pages have compared to yours. You’ll be surprised what “extra” information is missing.
Poorly Written Content
Alongside the above, if the content is poorly written, it’s also classed as thin. This isn’t just poor grammar or spelling, either. It’s poor use of heading tags, paragraphs, and even cases of keyword stuffing.
Source: Express Writers
Content should one, engage the reader, two, fulfil the searcher’s intent, and three, be easy for search engine crawlers to understand.
Scraped Content
Scraped content is content that is copied from other websites and/or sources without referencing or permission. This is otherwise known as plagiarism.
You can use various tools to detect plagiarised content. For instance, Copyscape or Originality. These will tell you what content you’ve copied or who’s copied your content.
The problem occurs because of uniqueness. Search engines want unique content. Content that is thin (or scraped) isn’t unique. It’s copied.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content shouldn’t get mixed with scraped content.
Scraped content is plagiarised content from other web pages. However, duplicate content is the same content (titles, page content, and meta tags) on multiple pages on the same website.
This is just an example of how to use Copyscape to find duplicate content. The duplicate content found is the author’s bio.
In some cases, you’ll have duplicate content. That’s where canonical tags come into play. These say to search engines, “Hey, rank this content over anything else that’s similar”. This will stop search engines from penalising duplicate content.
Doorway Pages
Doorway pages are website pages that just rank by stuffing keywords or links to low-value sites.
An example would be a Local Search Directory or something similar. It has low-quality, low-word count content that serves very little purpose apart from linking to another website.
Reference: Example of Doorway Page
Author Pages
Author pages for blogs usually have low word count content. Not only that, sometimes duplicate content, as the website uses the same author summary on the blog as on the author page.
You either need to make the author page unique or noindex it. Many people noindex them as they don’t have a huge SEO impact.
AI Content
Lastly, we have AI content. This is a sensitive topic in SEO. Google has announced that it won’t penalise AI content. However, it will penalise poor AI content.
To an untrained eye, AI content looks great. A small prompt and a click will give you a full blog post. Great, super easy. But that’s the problem. It’s too easy.
Everybody has access to AI now. It’s affordable. That also means everyone is producing AI content. It’s not unique, it’s not 100% factual, and it’s certainly not better than reading human-written text (yet).
How Does Thin Content Impact SEO
As you know, thin content refers to web pages that offer visitors little to no value. In other words, it doesn’t help or fulfil their search intent. And because of this, they rank poorly or never even get indexed.
The crackdown on thin content really comes from the 2011 Panda algorithm update. The goal of this update was to decrease the rank of thin content to improve user experience. Though it’s now very old, it’s still a core value at Google.
In 2018, they took this a step further. They introduced E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), meaning web pages needed to fulfil these three areas to be considered non-thin and of quality.
A few years later, in 2022, they updated E-A-T to E-E-A-T; the extra “E” was for “Experience”. This further improved the user experience.
And the main problem is that thin content doesn’t fulfil these areas. And with content that doesn’t fulfil this area is considered a poor user experience and, therefore, impacts SEO performance.
How to Find Thin Content
There are a few ways that you can find thin content on your website. Some are free, and some are paid.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (Or GSC) is a way to identify thin content. Here’s how:
- Go to GSC and log in.
- Click “Security & Manual Actions”
- Select “Manual Actions”
This will then pull up any issues that GSC can detect. This includes thin content. Once updated, you can ask GSC to review your website and update the Manual Actions section.
SEO Software
The easiest way to check for thin pages is to use SEO software like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Each of them has a similar process:
- Go over to your SEO software.
- Perform a site audit.
- Once the site audit is complete, go to “Issues”
Once you’ve clicked on “Issues”, it’ll pull up a few technical issues with your website. Thin content can be found in issues such as:
- Title tag issues
- Performance issues
- Redirect issues
- Internal linking issues
- Or duplicate content issues
Spider Software
With spider software, such as Screaming Frog, you can also find thin pages. With Screaming Frog, you can perform a crawl on the following areas:
- Flesh Reading Ease Score
- Spelling Errors
- Grammar Errors
- Word Count
Each of these can help improve thin content. For the Flesh Reading Ease Score (aka readability), you should aim for around 60. For spelling and grammar errors, there shouldn’t be any. And for word count, this depends on the content.
Manually
If you have a small website, you can also do it manually via a content audit. This may take longer. However, it’ll actually provide the best results.
Just go through each page and see whether it’s considered thin content. If it is, fix it. Simple as that.
Fixing Thin Content
There are many ways to fix thin content. The way you fix it depends on the way it’s considered thin content. Here are some ideas:
- Improve the Content
If you’ve looked at the content and decided it’s thin because it doesn’t fulfil the searcher’s intent, you can improve the content.
You can improve the content in several ways:
- Expanding on the topic
- Answering the user intent
- Updating outdated information
- Using visuals
- Creating case studies
The list can go on and on. However, the overall goal for this fix is to make the content better and more user-intentive.
- Consolidate Content
Maybe you’ve found several thin pages that are related to each other. In that case, you can actually consolidate all the thin pages into one large asset.
For example, let’s say you have a few thin pages such as “Can cats drink milk?”, “Can cats eat fruit?”, “Can cats eat beef?”, etc. If they’re all thin pages, consolidate them into one big asset: “XX Things Cats Can Eat & Drink”.
- 301 Redirect It
If your thin page has traffic, backlinks, and internal links, and you want to get rid of it, before doing so, 301 redirect it to another relevant page. It’ll pass on the authority without completely getting rid of it.
- Refocus Content
Perhaps the content you’ve written doesn’t quite fulfil the user intent. In that case, refocus it. It may be faster than creating another asset to target the keyword. Plus, if it already has some traffic and backlinks, it’ll perform better.
- Repurpose Content
If you’ve written content that’s considered thin, doesn’t have much traffic, and is valuable, repurpose it. Don’t get rid of it; you worked hard to create it. Recreate it into something else, like an infographic, a training module, a case study, etc.
- Delete It If Necessary
Lastly, if your web page is thin and has no traffic, internal links, or backlinks, you can get rid of it. This should be your last resort. However, it’s necessary if it’s not performing at all, as it’s just wasting your crawl budget and server capacity.
Final Word
After reading the above, you should have a better understanding of thin pages. As you can see, they can cause some issues in SEO performance.
Luckily, identifying and fixing thin pages is pretty easy. It can take time, depending on the severity, but it isn’t difficult to fix.
That being said, take a look at your website. Perform an audit, find thin pages, and start fixing them. You’ll be surprised by the results.
