Thin Content: How To Fix It and Skyrocket Your Search Rankings

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Content marketing has been around for a few years, but only recently have its payoffs become tangible. Many companies are rushing to create their own content in order to increase the number of visitors and potential customers they receive from search engines like Google. However, not all content is created equal- some strategies will work better than others depending on your industry and target audience. This article covers what you should do if you’re looking for more traffic as well as how it can be optimized further by following these three steps.

“The thin content checker” is a tool that will help you determine if your website has too much or not enough content. The “thin content checker” checks the amount of words on a page and determines whether it is at least 200 words, which is considered to be a minimum for most search engines.

Thin Content: How To Fix It and Skyrocket Your Search Rankings

Until 2011, when Google issued the Panda update, thin content had been the norm. The algorithm was created to combat the prevalence of low-quality material on search engine results pages (SERPs) by rewarding succinct information that is backed up by statistics and intelligent analysis.

Marketers could easily alter their search ranks back then by using keyword stuffing and link farm methods.

Fortunately for legitimate firms, Google had no choice but to react with the Panda update. 

While I’m not sure whatever signals were utilized to identify which websites had little material and which didn’t, sites with a lot of content began to rank well in search engines.

Another important element to remember is that the Panda algorithm does not reward a particular web page, but rather evaluates the overall content quality of your website. As a result, there’s no place for shortcuts or simple tactics.

You must prioritize repairing poor content alongside increasing content marketing efforts if you want to be seen on search engines for your company keywords and increase prospective buyer traffic.

Take a look at the graph below for my website’s search console. As you can see, my organic traffic has almost quadrupled in the past six months when compared to the preceding six.

google-search-console-chart

In addition, the quantity of organic keywords has increased.

organic-keywords-trend-chart

It wasn’t because I added new pieces to my blog; rather, it was because I updated some of the existing thin material. Doesn’t that sound intriguing? 

Stay with me until the conclusion of this piece, and I’ll tell you what I did to get these results.

What Is Thin Content, and Why Is It Harmful to Your Website?

Thin-content pages are those that provide little or little value to site users. Some instances are as follows:

  1. Error 404 page
  2. Pages with insufficiently succinct information
  3. Pages with little material
  4. There’s a little of everything here.
  5. Content with a low value

Let’s look at these instances in more detail and see how they effect your rankings:

1. The 404 page

The 404 error page is what happens when someone hits a certain page on your website and gets a 404 response code (“page doesn’t exist”). Google despises it as a visitor.

The major cause of the 404 error is because you previously had the page but erased it.

Google scans your website’s pages on a regular basis by giving a crawl budget. You’re squandering it by displaying a page with no content that needs to be indexed, which is a waste of Google’s work and resources.

It is considered thin material by the Panda algorithm, therefore it has a negative impact on your website’s SEO.

How to Resolve 404 Errors

Google Search Console is a service provided by Google.

If you have any, go into your Google Search Console and search under “index coverage” for the 404 error pages.

search-console-404-error-pages

Sitename (Via Site)

Go to Google Search and type in Site:yoursitename.com to view all the pages of your website that Google has indexed. After that, you’ll have to go through each page one by one to see which is returning a 404 error.

If your website has a big number of pages, finding 404 errors might be difficult. You may use tools like ScreamingFrog to aid you in these situations.

There are three options for dealing with 404 errors:

  1. Consider updating the page’s content.
  2. Add a 301 redirection to your home page or other related information. (You can accomplish this under “redirections” if you’re using the Rankmath plugin.)
  3. Feed your 404 URLs to the Google Search Console’s deletions tool.

These are just a few methods for locating and repairing 404 pages while still maintaining a good SEO profile for your website.

2. Pages with Incomplete Information

It is critical to provide brief information that is relevant to the intended audience. It’s not about writing more or less, but about adapting your content to the user’s goal.

My “Starting a Blog in India” article, for example, is in the top ten for 20+ competitive keywords and earns a lot of affiliate revenue. But things weren’t always this way. No matter how hard I tried to write it, I couldn’t get beyond the first page until I realized my error. In the conclusion of the piece, I mentioned work-from-home opportunities, which implies I was directing prospective candidates to seek for blogging alternatives and send them away.

And Google, the employer, was fully aware of the situation.

While you don’t have to write a 5,000-word post every time, make sure your visitors don’t leave your website with unresolved queries and return to Google for answers, or leave early because the material is filler.

Here are some tips on how to improve your content’s exposure:

Using Google Analytics, determine which sites or articles are receiving little or no traffic. After that, you’ll need to improve the material on them.

bloggers-chart-percentage

Eighty-two percent of marketers say that the greatest method to improve their SEO is to create fresh content. According to Orbit Media, however, the number of bloggers who update old material and bring additional traffic increases year after year. They recognize the importance of upgrading earlier content, and you should as well. As you add relevant keywords, it enhances the freshness aspect of your site and creates more organic traffic.

Here’s what you should be looking for:

  • Check for any broken external or internal connections and repair them.
  • Use alt text and title text to improve picture optimization.
  • Check for any numbers that need adjustment.
  • See if you can come up with any more examples.
  • Is the imagery still relevant?
  • Is it possible to use H1, H2, and H3 headings to target new keywords?
  • Is there a demand for greater information? Consider adding a FAQ section.
  • Replace the phrase “power words” with “entice prospects” in your title.

Every page on your website is worth reading and engaging with. So take action to provide the most possible value to both SEOs and people.

3. Pages That Are Sparse

While category pages assist users in navigating and understanding the website, they sometimes have negative consequences. A search engine, for example, may judge the information on a category page to be thin. It may extract excerpts from the postings it’s carrying, resulting in duplicate material. 

So, here’s how to repair it:

  • To better represent and rank for a term, include appropriate SEO title, URL, and description, just like you would for normal web pages.
  • To avoid carrying deadweight pages in your sitemap, increase the amount of articles per category page or make it endless.

Similarly, sites such as contact, disclaimer, privacy policy, author, and others will have little information to give search engines, thus noindexing them is a good idea.

4. Content Mixture

A web page with mixed content contains both HTTP (non-secure) and HTTPS (secure) resources.

For example, if a secure connection is used to load a website, but embedded resources like as pictures, videos, stylesheets, and scripts are loaded from a non-secure origin, browsers will display the message “unsecured error.” Your website’s overall SEO and user experience will suffer as a result of this (UX).

Mixed material, according to Google, compromises your website’s security and user experience while also exposing it to hackers. Sites with mixed material are also ranked lower than sites with just secure content.

The following steps will show you how to locate and correct mixed content:

Conduct a SEMrush site audit to see if your website has any problems with mixed content and how to resolve them.

Here’s how you can do it: HTTPS site assessment HTTPS deployment

https-implementation

Often, you can resolve this problem by asking your host provider to enable the HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) standard on your website.

It will be deemed duplicate content if your web pages can be seen on both HTTP and HTTPS. To prevent the problem, make sure your SSL certificate is configured properly to redirect your sites to HTTPS exclusively. 

Remember, HTTPS is an established Google ranking factor, so take it seriously.

5. Low-Value Information

Destructive information might appear on your website in a variety of manners. Here are a handful of them, along with how to remedy them:

Content that has been scraped or generated automatically

Scraping material is ineffective from both an SEO and a reader’s standpoint. That one duplicated element will eventually have a detrimental impact on the entire performance of your site.

Forget about duplicating anything word by word. Even minor changes, such as substituting synonyms for real words or running the article through paraphrase tools, might result in identical content. And that irritates Google.

Scraping material from high-quality sites, according to Google, does more damage than benefit.

While most specialized subjects have previously been explored, you can still bring something new to the table by connecting the dots and presenting it in a unique manner.

Pages with a lot of keywords

Keyword stuffing used to be a popular strategy, but it’s now a bad idea.

Manipulation of search rankings by adding keywords too many times into your material might result in your content being removed from consideration. Worse still, you might face a Google penalty.

It will be simpler for search engines to recognize your website and reward it for the proper keywords if you provide informative, rich content that employs relevant and context-based keywords.

Cannibalization is a term that has been used to describe the act of 

You shouldn’t use a single term to target across several pages on your website. If you do so, you’ll be competing against yourself, squandering crawl money and decreasing page authority while also confusing readers and search engines. 

Instead, develop a huge and authoritative directory by combining pages with comparable content and keywords.

Poorly written

If your material has grammatical errors, Google will not rank it. Furthermore, it tarnishes your visitor’s perception of you.

Simple writing is simple to read and provides value to your audience. However, by attempting to lure them in with shallow material, you are increasing your website’s bounce rate and enabling shallow content to undermine your authority.

I can’t emphasize enough how crucial it is to be direct and avoid fluff in writing. To deliver relevant, readable, and useful material, use tools like Grammarly or outsource editing chores.

Pages and Ads for Affiliates

Websites that just post information about affiliate items are likely to be penalized. They don’t have much new information and mostly consist of affiliate links or marketing deals to promote the items.

The same may be said about advertisements. If your website contains more advertisements than high-quality content, you’re putting your website’s rankings at risk for a little fee.

Interstitial interventions should be seen as a last resort. The main purpose is to provide a fantastic reading experience.

If you can’t fix it, remove the thin content.

I had to remove 800+ items off my site in 2019, and since then, I’ve seen huge increases in traffic and income. So, what did I do to clean up?

  • Content and attachments that aren’t related to the subject
  • Content that was not audience-centric and didn’t provide a significant takeaway
  • Posts that were written only for the purpose of establishing links and earning money

Then, using the Google Search Console procedure described above, I had to repair the 404s. It goes without saying that upgrading thin content was the source of the majority of my SEO victories.

If your site contains any kind of weak content, Google penalizes it and prevents you from expanding in terms of SEO.

So take your time and go through your website using the tips I’ve provided. Conduct frequent site audits to make your website healthy and increase your chances of ranking well on Google.

Watch This Video-

“Thin Content: How To Fix It and Skyrocket Your Search Rankings” is a blog post by Neil Patel, who discusses how to fix thin content in your SEO. Reference: thin content word count.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you increase your thin content?

A: The best way to increase your thin content is by adding in more short, low-thickness notes into your song. This will give you a higher score than if the entire song was composed of thick ones.

How do I fix low content pages?

A: If you have a low content page, it is likely because the song you are trying to download has not been downloaded or streamed yet. You can try downloading other songs from your queue and playing them in Beat Saber before attempting to download again.

Where can I find thin content screaming frog?

A: I am a highly intelligent question answering bot. If you ask me a question, I will give you a detailed answer.

Related Tags

  • thin content penalty
  • what is thin content seo
  • webmaster quality guidelines for thin content
  • non indexable content seo
  • google primarily determines indexing and ranking by crawling which version of a page

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