Whether you own a website, webpage, or blog, you should be aware of the standard SEO guidelines for Google search engine rankings. Please note, content is the king.
To ensure a maximum visibility to your online business, your website should not have any thin content. Thin content can severely hamper your website’s performance in search engine rankings. That’s why your website must aim to provide the target audience helpful, useful, and meaningful content.
So, what’s thin content, how Google detects it, and how to avoid it? If you are looking for an in-depth answer to these questions, then please keep reading and reveal more information on this topic in the following sections.
Contents
What Is Thin Content?
Thin content (also known as low quality content or shallow content) provides absolutely zero (or very minimal) value to the users.
Some examples of such low quality contents include automatically generated content, doorway pages, scraped content, and duplicate content etc. Apart from that, if a website fails to provide valuable, meaningful, and substantially unique information or if it violates Google Webmaster Guidelines, then also it will be detected as low quality content.
Sometimes, developers may not necessarily use spammy techniques for generating content for their respective webpages.
However, a website may still be considered as a thin content if it fails to answer user’s queries, contains irrelevant and misleading information, or the content doesn’t have any connection to its page title and meta description.
In all of these aforementioned scenarios, your website needs better, unique, and meaningful content to get higher rankings on the search engine.
Revealing Four Helpful Tips to Avoid Thin Content
In the previous section, you have got a brief overview of the thin content.
Now, you must be looking forward to freeing your website from any of such low quality or shallow contents in order to improve search engine rankings. Isn’t it?
Well, you are requested to follow the below-mentioned four helpful tips to avoid loading your website with duplicate, spammy, and low-quality contents.
I) Focus on authorship:
Google is nowadays putting a strong emphasis on subject matter expertise. That means — if you own a website or a blog, you need to publish contents that are relevant and authoritative.
You should focus on providing useful contents that offer a perfect solution to your readers’ problems.
In this way, your prospective audience will spend more time on your site and possibly come back & visit your page again. Consequently, Google will reward you with an improved ranking and increased traffic.
II) Add value to your content:
You should always aim to make your content as interesting and valuable as possible.
Hence, do not forget to put any piece of additional information (on your website/blog) that can increase its value. For example, when you are publishing an article on reliable food outlets of London, do not just list down the names of top-rated London-based restaurants.
You should also provide reviews of local food experts so that it adds more value to your content. Got the idea? So, do not shy away to use this brilliant tip while publishing your next article/content.
III) Do rigorous research and avoid keyword stuffing:
In the previous section, you have revealed the importance of publishing valuable and authoritative content.
To avoid thin content, do not load your article with flimsy and misleading information.
Instead, please do adequate research, build up your content with sound and reliable data, and promote your expertise.
Also, please avoid keyword stuffing to your content. Rather, you are requested to maintain an optimal usage of keywords so that your site obtains higher rankings.
IV) Write for humans (Not for the Machines):
This tip is extremely helpful when it comes to avoiding thin content. As a website owner, blogger, or administrator, do not forget the need of serving your human audience.
Therefore, whenever you are preparing content for your website, kindly keep in mind that your article must be written in such a way that it communicates the right information to the audience.
Not only it will increase the reliability of your blog and website, but also it will simultaneously improve your website’s ranking and drive more traffic to it.
How to Spot Thin or Poor-quality Content (for Google)?
Google Panda is one of the major spam-fighting algorithms that you should take into account quite seriously. Also note, this algorithm is now included as an official part of Google’s search engine ranking technique. Google Panda algorithm measures the quality of a website and then adjusts ranking accordingly.
[clickToTweet tweet=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!” quote=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!”]For Google Panda, any web content that damages the user’s experience can be classified as thin content. For example, if your website has duplicate contents, then it’s bound to fall under this category. Alternatively, if a website has unoptimized SEO structures, blank pages, high bounce rate, slow pages, or too many advertisements, Google Panda will identify and penalize it accordingly. For your reference, here’re the four common principles that are used by Google Panda when it comes to detecting poor-quality content.
I) Content Originality:
when the content is directly copied from another website, features too much similarity, or it’s duplicate.
II) Speed and Performance:
if it takes huge time to load a webpage, it will certainly result in a frustrating and annoying experience for users.
Subsequently, Google Panda will detect it as a low quality content.
III) Number of Advertisements:
to avoid the pitfalls of thin content, please do not load your website with annoying popups and heaps of ads.
IV) Formatting:
content formatting is important.
Hence, make sure to format your content with appropriate structure and heading.
[clickToTweet tweet=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!” quote=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!”]The Final Verdict: Key Points to Note
With this, you have revealed how Google Panda can efficiently spot out a poor-quality content, penalize a website, and drastically reduce its ranking on the search engine.
In this reference, here’re a few key points that you should follow so that your website and its content are flagged as reliable and high-quality.
[clickToTweet tweet=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!” quote=”4 Incredible Tips to Avoid Thin Content Penalty!”]• Publish unique, valuable, and meaningful content
• Use content segmentation, content types, and proper formatting for easy understanding & skim reading
• Implement a fast and responsive website layout
• Make your content purposeful and solve users’ problems
• Provide comprehensive and detailed supporting information with appropriate data (whenever required)