What is thin content?

Each page on your site should play a distinct role in selling your services and providing information to your users. The content on those pages should match the role the pages are playing. The content should be distinct and useful. Whether the content itself is text, images, rich media, links or other, if a page does to seem to play a distinct role and the content on it is sparse, unfocused and repetitive, then it could be counted as a thin content page.

If these kinds of pages are abundant on your site, you could get a thin content penalty. If Google believes the pages (or the site itself) aren’t directly useful or valuable for your users they won't want to pass traffic to the site. It’s possible to receive a manual penalty for thin content, or you might be affected by an update to Google Panda, the algorithm that polices the content quality of the sites in the search engine results.

The vast majority of thin content pages have usually been created specifically for SEO purposes, or they have a lot of duplicate content but aren’t malicious in intent, such as printer-only versions of web pages. Here are some examples of the first kind:

• Doorways
• Thin affiliate pages
• Automatically generated content
• Content copied from other sources
• Low quality content

Your pages may have been counted as thin content because they resemble any of the above, or simply because Google does not consider them to be useful. The way to identify thin content is to look at it from the user’s perspective. If a stranger were to land on your page from a Google search, would they find what they’re looking for? If they looked at other pages in the search engine results, are they likely to find something more useful?

What can I do about thin content?

To get your penalty lifted, you’ll need to jettison all instances of thin content and improve the value of your content for users. Google considers any of the following to be valuable:

• Original research and insight
• Well written and compelling
• Free from spelling and grammar errors
• Not stuffed with keywords
• Informative, useful and relevant
• Fresh, regularly updated or has long-term value

You may not think removing your content entirely is the best choice for your business. The truth is, it might not be the way to get your penalty lifted, either. To get it lifted, you’ll need to demonstrate to Google that your content has value for its users. That means you need to know what those users want – and what Google wants, too.

Our thin content recovery service focuses on getting your penalty lifted by giving you an actionable and realistic plan for adding value to your content. We provide a Forensic SEO audit of your site's content to help you find the offending pages, work with you to understand how to engage your users, and come up with a practical, cost-effective plan to provide valuable, unique content for them.

Once we’ve helped you improve the quality of your content, we submit a reconsideration request on your behalf to get the penalty lifted. We’ve had a 100% success rate in getting manual penalties fixed, so we’re a safe pair of hands.

If you’re looking to fix a thin content penalty from Google, contact us now or give us a call on +44 (0) 3301 333480 and we’ll help get your business back on track.