Thin Content: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, & How You Can Fix It

The word 'blog' spelt out in Scrabble tiles.
by: Dev Sperling | website content

The word 'blog' spelt out in Scrabble tiles.

At Sperling Interactive, when we look at SEO, we primarily look at five components: keywords on site, relevant links, your social media presence, having a mobile-friendly site, and dynamic content. Dynamic content refers to blogging. When you add blog posts to your website, it gives search engines new web pages and keywords to index. If you write six blog posts per month, that’s seventy-two more ways for Google and other search engines to come across you and promote you. With this in mind, it can seem that putting together any old piece of content will automatically boost your organic search results, but that’s not exactly the case. When creating content for your business, you should always avoid thin content at all costs.

What Is Thin Content?

Thin content is content that Google and other search engines thinks has little-to-no value to it. Google considers thin content as content that isn’t original, is stuffed with keywords, and is under 300 words long. It also interprets doorway pages (links that lead users to pages they weren’t anticipating to be directed to) and links to low-quality web pages as thin content. Thin content is essentially black hat SEO.

How To Avoid Thin Content

One way to avoid thin content is to have an editorial calendar. We advise being a month ahead in blog posts. So, since it’s July, you should focus right now on August blog content. And in August, you should be writing September’s posts. Most people stop blogging after the initial excitement of it. And if/when they do remember that they have a blog, they hastily put a post together to push out some content.

Another tip is keeping up-to-date with your industry. Follow blogs and publications that write about your industry so you can have related links in your blog posts and more ideas. Dynamic content includes a combination of internal and external links. Internal links being links to webpages on your site and external links being links to other websites. Be sure when you’re including links to external web pages, the websites are SEO-friendly, as Google values high-quality links.

What Should I Do If I Have Thin Content?

If you have thin content on your website, our best advice is to beef it up and revise it. If you have content that’s now out-of-date, update it and mention in the piece when you updated it. While you’re reworking your content, we suggest putting a noindex tag on the webpage so Google and other search engines won’t crawl it. When you’re ready for people to read the new and improved piece of content, put the content through Google Search Console and Bing so the two search engines can index it.

Are you finding that you need some more juice for your blog posts? Contact Sperling Interactive for some more guidance on how to spice up your blog posts!