In this article we will be taking a look at thin content, and why it might be a problem on your website.
How does Google measure thin content?
One of the ways we know that Google uses to measure thin content is user engagement and time spent on a page. This can sometimes be referred to as “time to long click”. The idea behind this is if a user visits your page and find good, engaging content, they are more likely to remain on that page for a longer period of time rather than returning quickly to the search results which indicates that your site wasn’t relative or didn’t provide the user with what they were after. This is why it is so important to make sure your page content and on page SEO all work together to answer your searchers intent. A good habit to get into when reviewing your website content is putting yourself in the shoes of a potential visitor, does your site provide the answers? Does it deliver what it promises to do?
Examples of thin content and how to fix it
Internal duplicate content
These are unique urls that point to the exact same content. Here are three examples of how this can happen;
www and non-www pages
For example https://www.mysite.com/my-page and https://mysite.com/mypage
If your site doesn’t redirect to one or the other domain protocols Google will read them as different pages and therefore would see duplicate content.
https and http
Similar to the above. If you are running your site over https (and you really should be!) you need to be redirecting all your traffic over SSL, otherwise like with the example above, Google will see it as duplicate content.
Filters, sorts and URL parameters
This is where a URL parameter sorts or filters your page content but essentially serves the same content, it often occurs on e-commerce category pages. For example
www.mysite.com/office-furniture?sort=asc&layout=grid
www.mysite.com/office-furniture?sort=desc&layout=list
In these cases, you can easily end up with 4 or 5 unique URLs for the same content.
How to fix
Ultimately you need to remove all examples of duplicate content on your site. 301 redirect and canonical links are your best friends here. If you think you have duplicate continue issues on your site but don’t know how to fix then get in touch with us and we will try and help.
External duplicate content
External duplicate content can be a result of scaping or lifting content from other pages and Google comes down quite hard on these issues even if the page structure is different. Scaping content off other sites also becomes an issue with morality and legality but it can also be an issue with authorised content duplication and syndication.
How to fix
If you have legal duplicate content the cross canonical links can be a solution. If you are illegally scraping content from other sites, then stop - simple as that.
Similar internal pages (near duplicate)
An example of where we sometimes see this is when a web site tries to rank their services for different locations and creates separate pages for each location. For example;
web design Bedford
web design Milton Keynes
web design Northampton
In this example, the majority of the content is the same for each page, with perhaps a few words swapped out to make it relevant to each location and a different image or two. The best outcome you can hope for with this is that Google will ignore these pages however there is a possibility that they will begin to penalise you.
How to fix
Beyond the obvious of removing these pages, you can also add META NOINDEX tags to these pages. The other option would be to and much more valuable content for these landing pages meaning they have value in their own right as pages.
Similar external pages (near duplicate)
We see examples of this a lot on commerce websites that use manufacture generated product descriptions and all the merchants use the same content on their sites. When this happens it becomes more difficult for Google to know why it should rank one page over another.
How to fix
Simply put, you need to add more unique value to your product pages. This can be down in a number of ways, for example, adding good quality reviews, adding unique video and experts opinion or your own guide to the product basically things that add value and better shopping experiences for the user. The main reason we hear website owners don’t do this is because of the amount of time it takes. If you have a few hundred products on your site, it will take a bit of time to write unique content for all of them, however, why not just start with your top 10 best sellers or products you want to promote?
Lack of content
Simply put, these are pages that lack actual content or are pages that are largely made up of structural elements like a header, excessive navigation, mega footers and sidebars containing automated content. It then becomes a simple matter of ratio’s between actual body content and this structural or style elements of the page.
Sometimes identifying these pages can be a bit challenging, especially if your page has lots of styled elements, by using a tool that strips away all CSS ( styles) you can see what the search engines see when they visit your page. tools like this one http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ can be used to see your site as a search bot would see it. if you use Chrome you can also user the web developer plugin to turn off CSS on your site which is a great tool for identifying thin content.
Pages with lack of content can also be created by over categorisation or by spreading content across too many pages which results in users having to click multiple links to access content that really could be included on the same page.
How to fix
Grouping similar pages together, reducing your site map and thus building richer content pages can be a solution to fix this. If pages are 90% structural and style then they are probably not serving the user with any worthy value can should probably be removed or combined with other relevant thin content pages.
How do I identify thin content on my site?
Google will sometimes alert you to thin content or low-quality content on your site via Google Search Console, but other times they won’t and you will have to discover these issues by yourself. There are a number of paid-for tools that can help you. If you subscribe to a service like MOZ or SEMRUSH then you will probably be familiar with their page error reporting tools but if you don’t have subscriptions to these services, here are a couple of tools you can use.
copyscape.com
Copyscape is an online tool that searches the internet for duplicate content, it can help notify you if anyone is stealing your content, but you can also use it to make sure your content (on product pages for example) is unique.
siteliner.com
Siteliner is a great free tool that scans your site and reports back on broken links, duplicate content and page power.
Hopefully, you have found this post useful and with this information, you are able to identify potential thin content issues on your site. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your site then please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
