What Is Thin Content?

Date First Published: 28th December 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what thin content is in this article.

Thin content describes content that has little to no value for users. Since the content is not helpful to users, it will result in a poor user experience, waste crawl budget, and be identified as spam by search engines. Doorway pages, low-quality affiliate pages, scraped content, content with stuffed keywords, hidden content, auto-generated content, duplicate content, and simply pages with little to no content are examples of thin content.

Non-Malicious Thin Content

Thin content is not always created with a malicious intent and is sometimes necessary for the functioning of a website. Pages like checkout pages, error pages, and success pages are examples of these. Search engines are usually prevented from indexing these pages by adding the "noindex" tag as they are not the sort of pages that should come up in the search results.

Difference Between Thin Content and Short Content

There is a big difference between thin content and short content. If content is short, it doesn't mean that it is thin. Short textual content can still be considered high-quality content if it quickly answers the user's question and benefits the user experience. An example of this is FAQ pages, which answer lots of questions with short answers. Short content that solves someone's problem quickly is preferred over long posts that require users to look through large chunks of text to find the answer to their question.

Impact On SEO

Thin content has a negative impact on SEO as it is less likely to get any backlinks, greatly slowing down the process of link building. It will also waste the crawl budget and could result in Google penalties. Google penalties consist of lowering or deindexing the page. Also, it is much more likely that visitors will bounce off the website because the content does not match their search intent. In other words, the content does not match what they were searching for.

Due to the reasons above, thin content will increase bounce rate. Even though bounce rate is not a direct Google or Bing ranking factor, it will reduce conversions. For an online store, this will have a negative impact on sales and revenue, but no impact on SEO.

History

Thin content has been used in the past to unethically help sites rank for more keywords without the effort of writing high-quality content. Thin content was able to rank in the top search results for competitive keywords in the search engines. Google then released its first Panda algorithm update in February 2011. The goal of the update was to prevent low-quality content from ranking high in the search results and penalise websites with thin content.

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