How Thin and Low-Quality Content Will Affect Your SEO

We are always talking about the importance of SEO and having a highly-optimized website. But, if you don't have high quality, valuable content to go along with it, you will struggle to rank high on Google. We are talking about web pages that have no content, in other words, 'thin' content.

Google prioritizes good quality content that is unique and has secondary information that supports the topic. In other words, your content should answer the user's question, and you need to explain to the search engine what you are doing. If you are not, then you cannot find yourself anywhere near the first page of Google, no matter how good your website is!

Google treats door pages, low-quality affiliate pages, and low-content pages as thin content pages. In this post, we will discuss how not having any content or low quality content on your web pages can affect your SEO and how you can fix it.

What is thin content will affect SEO?

Google describes thin content as content that has "little or no added value." It can be a web page with no content, or not enough to provide value to the reader. If they fall under one of these four categories, the material may be considered thin or low-quality:

1. Low-quality or no content

The length of your content is not necessarily an indicator of thinness, 'Google also takes into account the amount of time a user spends on a page before clicking back to the search engine result page and clicking on another website. looks like. It emphasizes the need for high quality content that keeps your visitors on your website.

A large number of pages will be seen on web pages with no content, but due to the lack of available information the due time on page is less. Imagine a user landing on your website, and clicking on the About Us page because they want to know more about your company. If there is no content in our page about you, or not enough to provide the context and information that the reader is looking for, they will leave the page. This would be an indicator for Google that the website contains low quality content.

Low-quality content comes in many forms. It may be that the content itself is poorly written, contains unnecessary filler words, is unrelated to the page itself, the page is full of advertisements, it promotes hate and / or harm, or 'clickbait' Is understood as you can learn. 

2. Lack of context

Content can also be caused by a lack of content context, a lack of keywords, and a lack of answers. The content must be informative for the user visiting the page and understandable for the page that is on it.

If you have visited a web page for pet grooming and half of the content discusses doggy Day care, the page will have thin content for the main topic. Sure, Page can talk about doggy daycare, but the main focus should be on pet grooming. At the same time, the page should have a good keyword density for your main and semantic keywords. Finally, if the page is not answering the user to their search query, then it is not going to rank well.

3. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like; This is content that appears multiple times on the Internet or on your website. If you are using the same content in more than one page, it will be considered duplicate content, and Google may penalize your website. Although some pages may not be intentionally duplicated, some technical mistakes are considered duplicate, such as not redirecting the URL properly or establishing canonical links.

If duplicate content was created by mistake, Google did not punish you. Nevertheless, if they discover that it was intentionally created as spam or to manipulate search results, your website can be penalized. That being said, although Google cannot punish you for duplicate content, it can still lead to SEO problems. If you want to get into the naughty-gritty of duplicate content, Ahrefs has an in-depth guide.

4. Scattered Content

This is content that has been copied or scraped from another site. This is essentially material that has been copied and pasted with little rewrite or re-arrangement.

Plagiarized content is heavily relied upon, and can be considered copyright infringement. If your important content is copied, it also has the implication of lowering your website's ranking, as Google may consider the site to be of little value. This is why you need to create original content for your website.

If you are concerned that your content may be tarnished or fragmented, you can use tools such as Grammarly to check the uniqueness of the content.

How can thin content be fixed?

To find thin material; You can audit the content of your website. Take a deep dip in each web page and when you do this check the following:

• Is this content valuable to my audience? Is the content still relevant (e.g., old news or company updates)
• Is the length of the content on this page sufficient? Does it provide meaningful information on its current length?
• Is this page optimized? Is it targeting the right keywords?
• Is this page getting traffic and backlinks?
• Once you find out, the time has come to work and improve (or remove) these pages.

How to improve your website content

When you encounter low-quality - or thin - material, it is to ignore it and instead focus on creating new content. However, it is better and more effective to adopt a 'spring-cleaning' strategy. Essentially, this involves augmenting existing content on your website to web pages that already appear on Google, rather than creating new web pages that need to be crawled. Add high-quality content to your web pages, ensuring that they provide value to your users and address your business' unique proposition.

Here are 7 things you can do to 'spring-clean' your stuff:

1. Check the content of your website: Use tools like Copyscape and Siteliner to find any duplicate content, thin content, broken links, and more.
2. Fix and add link: Fix any broken link and interlink related where possible. You do not want to lose visitors because a link is broken, as well, interlinking can encourage visitors to check more pages on your website. Linking to other sources can also increase the validity of your content.
3. Use canonical URLs: A canonical URL is a technical solution that can help prevent duplicate content on your website. This will tell the search engine which page is the main source of that content and does not penalize you for using that content on another page.
4. Keyword research: Include relevant keywords in your content related to your industry and page topic. For keyword research, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and Ahrefs.
5. Remove invaluable Pages: If you are removing a page that has SEO value, but you do not want to keep it, make sure you redirect 301 to a similar page so that your visitors do not come to the 404 error page. . If you are removing a page that has no SEO value or backlink, you will not need to create a redirect.
6. Satisfactory search intent: Revise and expand the content to ensure that you are always answering questions from visitors to that page. Make sure you are increasing the word count on your most important pages, such as service pages and landing pages - emphasizing who, why, how, what, where and what next.
7. Add statistics or data: Include any statistics or data that is telling your content and helps to boost its value. Remember to add your sources.

The conclusion

Thin content can be harmful to your website. If you have content that performs poorly, your website can dip into search engine rankings. Focus on creating content that benefits your website visitors. Consider the importance of valuable content in converting visitors into leads - your content should tell the user why they should do business with you instead of your competitor.