What Is Thin content?
Thin content refers to website pages or articles that don't provide much valuable or unique information for readers/visitors.
This type of content is usually very short, lacking in-depth details, quality, and substance. It may also contain content that is copied from elsewhere or even generated automatically by software rather than written by a human.
Thin content is considered low-quality by search engines like Google. Having a lot of thin, unhelpful content on your website can actually hurt your search rankings.
To keep search engines happy and provide a good experience for users, it's important to create content that is informative, relevant to your audience, well-researched, and engaging to read.
Common Examples of Thin Content
Super short pages with barely any text or information provided.
Pages with content that has been automatically generated by software rather than written by a human.
Pages where the content has simply been copied word-for-word from somewhere else on the web.
Pages created with the sole purpose of trying to rank in Google rather than helping the user. These are called doorway pages.
Pages overloaded with ads and affiliate links but very little actual quality content for the reader.
Pages with low-quality or unhelpful images that don't add much value to complement the text.
Content that gets little to no engagement from users - no comments, no shares on social media etc.
Why Does Thin Content Matter?
Thin content matters for several reasons, including:
Search Engine Optimization
Search engines like Google want to show informative and relevant content in their search results.
If a website has a lot of thin, low-substance pages that lack valuable information, search engines see that as low-quality.
Having an abundance of thin content can negatively impact that website's search engine rankings.
User Experience
When users visit a site expecting helpful information but only find low-value, lacking content, they'll likely leave quickly feeling unsatisfied.
This leads to poor user experience and increases the website's bounce rate - a signal to search engines that the content isn't meeting users' needs.
A high bounce rate from thin, unhelpful content can directly hurt that site's search engine rankings.
Brand Reputation
When users land on a site with little valuable information, they may view the brand as unprofessional or untrustworthy.
A website full of thin, low-quality pages makes a poor impression on visitors which can harm the brand's reputation over time, making it harder to attract and keep customers.
How to know that you have thin content on your page?
Here is how you can know if your page/pages have thin content:
Analyze length and depth
When looking at your content, don't just focus on the word count or length. The depth and level of detail are what really matter for determining if it's thin or high-quality.
Very short articles, blog posts or pages with only a few sentences or short paragraphs are likely thin content. That's not enough space to fully explore a topic and provide true value to the reader.
On the other hand, longer in-depth pieces that go into comprehensive detail and offer original insights tend to be higher quality, more engaging content.
However, the length itself isn't and shouldn't be the goal. The priority should be making sure you thoroughly answer the reader's question and give them the complete information they need - whether that takes 300 words or 3,000 words.
Therefore, don't focus on the word count target as some topics can be covered well in a few paragraphs, while others may need long-form, multi-page content.
The key is providing enough useful detail, researched facts, examples, and unique insights to make it a valuable, high-quality piece of content for the reader.
Hitting a certain length through fluff or redundancy doesn't make it better.
As John Mueller replied to a tweet:
Check for duplicate content
Checking for duplicate content is crucial when trying to identify and avoid thin content on your website.
Duplicate content refers to text that appears word-for-word on multiple web pages or sites.
Having duplicate content can cause major issues with search engines like Google, often resulting in poor rankings for those pages. Search engines view duplicate content as low-quality and thin.
To audit your site for duplicate content, use a plagiarism checker tool like Copyscape or Grammarly.
These tools will scan all your website's content and compare it against other online sources to flag any instances where the text matches elsewhere on the internet.
If the tool identifies pages on your site with duplicate content copied from other places, you have a couple of options.
Either remove those duplicate pages entirely or rewrite the content to make it completely unique and original.
Simply having pages with unoriginal, copied text provides no new value to users. Removing or rewriting duplicate content is necessary to avoid having thin, unhelpful pages that could negatively impact your site's search performance.
Engagement metrics
Engagement metrics like comments, shares, and likes can serve as helpful indicators of whether your content is thin or valuable. Thin, low-quality content often lacks user engagement.
If you notice low engagement levels across your pages - little to no comments, social shares, etc. - it could mean the content isn't resonating or providing enough value. Users don't feel motivated to interact with thin, unhelpful pages.
For example, a blog post that covers a topic at only a surface level without offering any new insights or depth is less likely to drive engagement.
Readers may not feel compelled to comment or share something they view as basic or thin content.
On the other hand, high-quality, substantive content that thoroughly explores a subject and delivers worthwhile value tends to encourage more engagement from the audience.
Content analysis tools
Content analysis tools can be extremely valuable for comprehensively auditing your website and pinpointing thin, low-quality content pages.
These tools leverage algorithms and machine learning to automatically analyze your content.
They evaluate factors like content length, depth, originality, grammar/readability, as well as engagement metrics like comments and shares.
The tools then provide detailed reports and suggestions on which specific pieces of content could be considered thin or low-value based on the analysis.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a popular writing assistant tool that analyzes your content for proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure.
While it doesn't directly flag thin content, using Grammarly is still beneficial when auditing for low-quality pages.
If the writing itself is poor in addition to other content issues, that reinforces that the page needs improvement to avoid being labelled as thin, low-value content.
Copyscape
Copyscape is a tool that checks for duplicate content on your website. Duplicate content is a common sign of thin, low-quality pages.
By using Copyscape, you can scan your site's pages and identify any instances where the content duplicates text from other websites.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a tool that crawls and analyzes all the pages and content on your website.
It looks at factors like page titles, descriptions, word counts, internal linking, and more to evaluate the quality and SEO-optimization of each piece of content.
Screaming Frog can help identify thin content pages based on signals like extremely low word counts, lack of internal links, missing titles/descriptions, etc.
These types of shortcomings often indicate a page lacks substance and valuable content for users.
By crawling your entire site, Screaming Frog surfaces these potentially thin pages so you can prioritize improving or removing them.
How to fix it?
Fixing thin content can involve a variety of strategies depending on the specific issues with the content.
Here are some general steps you can take to fix thin content:
Identify thin content
To identify thin content on your website, utilize these easy methods we have covered. Go through your website systematically using a combination of these techniques.
Combine similar pages
If you have multiple pages on your site with duplicate or very similar content, consider combining them into one comprehensive page.
Having the same content spread across different pages dilutes the quality and provides little new value for users. It can also hurt your search engine rankings.
By taking those near-duplicate pages and merging the content into a single, robust page, you create a more substantive and valuable piece of content.
Delete it
If a page on your website is extremely thin on content, low-quality, or outdated, sometimes the best solution is just to delete it entirely.
For pages that are extremely lacking in valuable information or are essentially useless for visitors, it may not be worth trying to update or improve them.
Add more content
One of the best ways to upgrade thin, surface-level content is to simply add more substance to it.
If a page is lacking depth, details, or comprehensiveness on the topic, fill it out with additional helpful information.
Add more text explanations, relevant images/videos, statistics, examples, and richer insights.
But before expanding the content, do some extra research first. Look for credible sources you can reference to add factual details, quotes, data points, or other valuable knowledge to include.
The key is making sure any new content you add provides original value - don't just duplicate what's already on other websites about the topic.
Fixing technical issues
It is an important part of addressing thin content on your website.
Here are some technical issues that you should consider when trying to fix thin content.
www vs. non-www URLs
If your website has both www and non-www versions, this can create duplicate content issues and confuse search engines.
Choose one version (www or non-www) as your preferred domain, then set up a permanent 301 redirect so that any attempts to access the non-preferred version (like www when you chose non-www), will automatically redirect to the correct, primary URL.
HTTP vs. HTTPS
If your website still uses the older HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS, it's crucial to make the switch to HTTPS.
HTTPS provides a secure, encrypted connection that protects user data and privacy when browsing your site. HTTP does not have these security measures.
While Google has stopped using HTTPS as a direct ranking factor, having a secure site is still extremely important for user trust and engagement.
Visitors are much more likely to trust, browse, and interact with HTTPS websites they know are safe versus non-secure HTTP sites.
This increased user trust and engagement from HTTPS can indirectly lead to better performance in search results over time.
So make the move to HTTPS if you haven't already. It protects your site visitors, builds trust in your brand, and signals a quality experience - all of which contribute to long-term SEO success.
Print Pages
Print pages are the bare-bones versions of your website pages that get created when someone clicks the "print" button on their browser. These print-friendly pages often contain very little actual content.
Since they get automatically generated and have such minimal content, print pages can be flagged as thin, low-quality pages that provide little value.
So either disable print pages altogether through your website settings or enhance those versions with enriched content to make them more valuable.
Comment pagination
When you have a lot of user comments on a website page, it's better to break them up into smaller "pages" rather than showing them all at once. This is called comment pagination.
Splitting up comments into paginated sections improves the user experience by making it easier to navigate and read through lots of comments. It prevents an overwhelming wall of text.
Pagination also helps prevent thin content flags. Each paginated comment page will have a reasonable amount of content instead of just a tiny handful of comments.
To properly set up comment pagination:
Use the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags to indicate to Google that these pages are all part of the same comment thread.
Set a limit on how many comments show per page, like 10-25 comments max.
Make sure each paginated page has enough unique content beyond just comments. Include the original post text, article details, etc.
Properly configured pagination with appropriate content densities signals to Google that this is legitimate content separation, not just thin pages.
Without pagination, you risk either overwhelming visitors with a giant block of comments or each comment paginated URL appearing as low-value thin content.
Mobile designs
In the past, some websites used different subdomains like m.example.com to show a mobile-optimized version to visitors on smartphones and tablets.
While well-intentioned for providing a good mobile experience, having completely separate desktop and mobile versions of the same website can create duplicate content problems.
This happens if the mobile subdomain's pages aren't properly connected and pointing back to the canonical desktop versions as the main source.
To avoid these duplicate content issues with mobile sites, you need to use the canonical tag.
This tag tells search engines like Google that the mobile page is just an alternate version, and the desktop URL is the main, preferred version of the content.
Category pages
On product websites, some category pages may only contain a handful of items, making them seem like thin, low-value content to search engines.
There are two main ways to handle these sparse category pages:
Removing the thin category from your website structure altogether is one solution. However, this could negatively impact the user experience if that category was helpful for navigation and finding products.
A better option is to keep the category page live for users but add a noindex tag. This tag tells Google not to include that specific URL in their search results since it lacks substantial content.
The noindex tag allows real visitors to still access and use the category page for navigation and browsing your products. But it signals to Google that this isn't a content page to index and rank.
Noindex eliminates any thin content penalties, while still providing a good user experience with your category structure intact.
Conclusion
Thin content negatively impacts search rankings, traffic, and user engagement. Identify thin pages by analyzing content quality, engagement metrics, and technical issues like duplicates.
Once identified, fix thin content by combining duplicate pages into robust pieces, deleting extremely thin pages, adding more value and depth, and resolving technical issues.
Eliminating thin content for high-quality pages strengthens your site's overall search performance and user experience.