What’s Thin Content and How Does it Impact My SEO?

Thin content is a web page that offers little to no value. Generally, these pages have little content or perhaps even no content. And some website owners who discover they have thin content pages will duplicate content from other pages to fill it out. But that has risks and detriments to it too. 

Pages with thin content will impact SEO across your entire website by pulling down their rankings. And many website owners don’t realize that these pages of thin content are what’s impacting their ability to rank for new keywords and offer greater ROI from their website efforts. A struggle with thin content is that Google Search Console and Google Analytics won’t show you that you have thin content on your website.

So how can you identify thin content and resolve the issue? Here’s your guide to resolving thin content to experience greater SEO results sitewide. 

How to Identify Thin Content

Tools like Screaming Frog or SEMRush can help you identify thin content. Some services just tell you the total word count and not whether these pages are considered thin. Each industry and website will be different as to how much content and context the page needs to avoid being considered thin content. 

You’ll likely also notice that these pages don’t rank well and don’t see tons of traffic. This does not mean that you should just go through and add content to the pages without a strategy. Worthless content is just as bad as thin content. And don’t copy and paste content from other pages to this page because that causes duplicate content. Google knows you didn’t put effort and thought into these pages. 

Resolving Thin Content Pages

When looking to resolve pages that have thin content, you have several options.

1. Rewrite the content on the page to offer more expertise, detail and clarity. On some pages, this might be challenging. For example, awards pages often have little content. Integrating that content into the about us page might be more valuable. 
2. Add a no-index tag to these pages. This means that Google won’t index the pages so you can keep the page as-is without the need to build out the content further if you find that to be unnecessary. Perhaps this page is just for you to link to from other internal pages and you don’t want it discoverable from search engines.
3. Delete and redirect the page. Perhaps you’ll merge it as in the example of the awards page above. Or you might decide the page has no value on your website at all. This can happen as companies grow and change and discover that some content is no longer necessary. But if you delete a page, just be sure you redirect it to a relevant page just in case you have a link out there somewhere that goes to this old page. 

Some websites have dozens or even hundreds of pages with thin content. And at the beginning of the project, you might feel overwhelmed and like you can’t accomplish rewriting or handling these pages.

Take the project slowly. Create a document with all these pages in it and review them one by one to determine the best course of action for each. Set a goal to handle a specific number of pages each month to ensure you’re making regular progress toward optimizing your site.

Don’t make rash decisions and delete pages without a full evaluation just to get the project done. Deleting tons of pages at once could also have a detrimental effect on your SEO and you might end up with broken links if you try to fix this issue in a day or a week.

Keep the big picture in mind no matter what challenges in your SEO you’re currently facing.

Choosing a High-quality SEO Partner

Websites with dozens or hundreds of pages of thin content often have worked with cheap or inexperienced SEO companies. These companies write many short blogs that provide little value to your website.

All SEO professionals are not equal and many sell their services promising ample new content each month. But quality matters far more than quantity in the case of generating content.

New Light Digital offers a high-quality SEO strategy mixed with outstanding content marketing that avoids thin content and delivers results that help you rank better. We can build a plan that resolves thin content no matter how much of it you currently have on your website. Schedule a free consultation to learn more about these services. 

Further reading:

• What’s the Difference Between Good Content and Excellent Content?
• How Often Should I Publish Blogs for Best SEO Results?
• Do People Actually Click on Google PPC Ads?