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Google Updates Appear to Punish Thin Content Pages
Rebecca Appleton • 13 May 2020
Do you Understand Thin Content and How it Negatively Impacts Your Website’s SEO?
It’s not a new expression but it’s a term you are going to hear more of within the SEO industry. Thin content in a nutshell is weak or poor-quality content which lacks purpose. Recent Google updates appear to have been focused on sniffing out and punishing thin content and as a result, we’re seeing a lot of fluctuation within the search engine results pages. This could mean your own website has suddenly dropped in the rankings.
Thin content is an issue because content is one of the most powerful aspects of modern-day SEO success. Content is indeed king and while that message does appear to be understood, its interpretation is often incorrect. In reaction to the need to take content more seriously, many brands and businesses set out to produce more content than ever, believing it would boost their SEO and overall online visibility. Unfortunately, this often meant there was too much eagerness to create lots of new pages and not enough of a commitment to creating good quality, purposeful content.
Google’s Panda updates, which started in 2011, were the start of the search engine’s mission to prevent low quality content ranking higher than good quality content as a result of spammy content and questionable link building tactics. Panda introduced measures we all now take for granted as being punishment for duplicating content. Google classes duplicate content as thin content because it recognises that duplicated content has no value greater than the original piece. As such, its algorithms intentionally seek out these pages so they can be actively punished. Recent algorithm updates seem to be expanding on this approach and causing a great deal of SERP changes.
How to avoid thin content
Avoiding thin content is really a pretty simple process. It all starts with remembering that engines like Google want to give search users the right search results. That means good quality, trustworthy, credible content.
When you’re creating your SEO strategy and building new pages, your first and foremost thought should be ‘how is this page and this content adding value to the visitor?’. If you want to rank for a certain keyword, ensure you’re creating content which genuinely compliments the search term and helps the search user with their query. This means creating useful, unique content which talks about the subject matter in some depth rather than simply reciting the focus keyword again and again. It means genuinely interlinking with other pages of your website which cover the same or a similar topic. It means making reference to external sites which are appropriate and relevant – for example, a scientific journal, a newspaper report or a recent study.
These new updates show that business owners have nowhere to hide with fewer underhanded tactics available in order to rank well in Google. Embrace content production and content marketing the way it is intended; for the benefit of your audience.
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