Thin content

Thin content is a basic SEO term. Thin content is any low-quality content that brings nothing to the user visiting a website — in other words, content that is useless and not relevant at all to the visitor.

The term thin content appeared hand in hand with Google’s Panda algorithm, which was launched in 2011. This algorithm focused on preventing low-quality content from appearing in the top search results, and it caused a real revolution in the result ranking factors in Google. In many cases, the SERPs changed radically.

1. Types of thin content

There are different types of thin content; generally speaking, it refers to pages or URLs with these characteristics:

• Very short content. It should be noted that not all short content is thin content, but it can certainly become thin content if it does not exceed 300 words and does not offer quality content to visitors.

Relevant content that offers short but useful information to visitors is not thin content, even if it is under 300 words; on the other hand, a product page that barely lists the product name and its price is indeed thin content.

• Duplicate or plagiarized content. It is perhaps one of the most common types, where content is copied from other websites and pasted into your own. This will create problems with Google, as well as with its legitimate creators (the legal implications that plagiarism entails).

This ranges from simple copy and paste to spinning texts: a black hat SEO practice based on copying texts and rewriting them.

• Automatically generated content. Google can detect automatically generated content, which is produced by applications specifically created for that purpose.

These texts usually have patterns that give them away: spelling mistakes, grammatical inconsistencies, disjointed translations, etc.

• Doorway pages. These are pages where, without making any sense, the same keywords and long tails are repeated with the sole purpose of redirecting traffic to a website, without adding any kind of value, even if this content has no value at all.

Google also considers as doorway pages those that redirect to another site without the user’s consent (in a disguised way).

2. How to avoid thin content?

It is vital to avoid thin content, as this type of content will be penalized by Google — and you don’t want to be penalized, right? Here are some good practices to avoid creating content that could be penalized:

• Expand and rewrite. If you suspect that some content is not up to standard, the best thing to do is to rewrite it so it can regain importance, or expand it with updated information that adds value to what was already mentioned.

A good length, one that ranks well, is around 1,200 words.

• Create original content. It is often said that content is king, and in this case it clearly applies. Make sure your content is unique, high quality, original and valuable to those who consume it.

It is work that requires effort, but it will also allow you to become a benchmark in your sector and increase engagement with your users.

• Take care of the design. Standing out among the huge amount of published content is very hard, but don’t despair: give your content a visual structure that helps it stand out. Use eye-catching images, videos, infographics, tables, etc.

Even the choice of font and its size are relevant; they will allow you to present your content in a more attractive way and stand out if you work on it correctly.

• Watch out for duplicate content. Avoid it not only because of Google but also to comply with the law. There are many tools that allow you to do this; some of them are: Google Search Console, Siteliner, Plagiarisma and Plagium.