Identifying Thin Content

Search engines crawl a website, constantly finding and indexing new content. Webmasters are constantly trying to create new content to outrank their competitors, give search engines more reasons to revisit their websites, and keep their users engaged.

What is thin content?

We can define thin content as content that has little or no added value for the user. Duplicate content, auto-generated content, and some spinning content are examples of thin content types. Even if it is not created as one of the above content types, content that does not respond to a user’s query is also considered thin content. Keeping content long and keeping the word count long does not mean that the content is quality. With the Panda and Hummengbird updates, Google has started to measure content quality more.

What are the harms of thin content for a website?

Google can penalize you if it finds spammy, bad content on your website. One of these penalties is the deindexation penalty. You will see that there is a problem with your indexes and traffic when you are sent a message via Search Console. You may also encounter problems if Google, which spends crawl budget on weak content, does not crawl your quality content. Therefore, you can merge your weak content or remove it from the index.

Situations that will cause weak content

Especially on e-commerce sites, filters are used to narrow down the results and open on different URLs. This situation consumes crawl budget and also leads to poor content production. You can resolve this situation with the canonical tag.

Search results pages within the site can create websites with weak content. A solution can be to associate and extract pages that are relevant to the search query, or to hide search results from the index.

Both www and non-www addresses are open to Google indexing, which creates weak content due to duplicate content. We can solve this problem by doing a 301 redirect.

Open HTTP and HTTPS pages allow for thin content due to duplicate content. The problem can be solved by doing a 301 redirect.

If you don’t let Google know that mobile and AMP pages are separate by specifying the canonical on websites where you use AMP, you may end up with weak content due to duplicate content.

Why weak content is bad for SEO

It reduces the overall quality of the website

For starters, when Google evaluates the quality of a web page, one of the things it takes into account is how many quality pages from the same website are included in the index. Therefore, having a website with many pages with thin content reduces your page ranking and reduces Google’s trust in you.

Content is king

Second, to rank high on Google, you need to have great content that matches the search intent. Anything less than that won't get you anywhere near the first page of Google, no matter what tricks you try to fool their algorithms.