Since the time when the implications of the Panda and Penguin Updates have hit all the website owners, the “thin” content has been one of the most hated factors by Google. Trying to be thin may be good in reality, but in case of the virtual world, you have to have your content flattened up a little bit, so that the new SEO philosophy does not demark your website.
As a reader, what do you expect from a website? Complete, informative and original content that will satiate your thirst is most desired, right? That is the point, where Google dismissed every website that presented unoriginal and amalgamated content. And this is technically called a “thin” content.
What is thin content?
As Google has specific mind-sets on the “thinness” of your content, you must also know how Google Search Quality Raters will rate your content. However, there are too many speculations regarding this and the most commonly understood factor is quality of your content. But, no matter how persuasive you have been in producing your content, it is ultimately an algorithm or a machine’s perspective that will determine whether your content is “thin” or not.
How to assess if your content is thin or not?
The assessment is solely based on some of the SEO tools that Google runs on every website. The common goal is to have high page rank. But the tools focus on differentiating those websites and contents that only increase noise on search engines. If it impedes crawl budget or if the internal link counts are inflated, your content will be considered thin. The tools that are used to understand the “thinness” of content are:
- Screaming Frog
This tool runs a URL scrape on your site and the URLs are sorted by word count. If more than half of your website posts are 250 words, it is not very good and considered thin.
- Analysis of the page ranks
The exit rate of your website pages is very important. If the number of visitors leaving your website’s pages is more than 75%, your content will be considered thin. This is because the high bounce rate is due to an absence of good content and also because it does not serve its purpose for users. However, Google does not always blame content for this and admits that this bouncing of visitors may cause if many external links are opening up in the same window, or in case there are other SEO difficulties that you need to take care of.
What is the solution?
So, now the question arises, what to do with the “thin” content? Technically, if you are not running too low on your budget, try not to dilute your page or impede the users anymore and simply discard it. Or, you can try to revive it if you think that it has that aesthetic quality to engage readers. For new content try to analyse which pages are getting more visits and more user engagement and follow them.
