What Is Thin Content and How Can You Fix It?

Thin content refers to content with little to no value to users. Automatically generated, syndicated, or scraped content, doorway pages, duplicate content, pages without originality, and low-quality affiliate content are examples of thin content. Pages stuffed with keywords may also be considered thin content. This may attract a penalty from Google, damaging your brand reputation and authority. Thin content hurts search engine optimization (SEO). It may result in high bounce rates, keyword cannibalization, bad user experience, and a lack of backlinks. However, you can still recover from it.

How to Fix Thin Content

1. Identify Thin Content

Identifying thin content on your website is the first step toward fixing it. Auditing your site can help spot web pages with duplicate content, low word count, scraping issues, keyword stuffing, and poor-quality affiliate pages. You can use tools like Google Search Console Screaming Frog and Copyscape to crawl your website.

If you have several posts targeting similar keywords, it may result in keyword cannibalization or duplicate content, causing your pages to compete to rank for the exact keywords. Developing a robust keyword strategy and assessing your rankings can help prevent these issues. Once you identify thin content, fixing it becomes easier.

2. Rewrite Your Posts to Ensure Original Content With Value

Original content is essential for an effective content marketing strategy. Creating unique, good-quality content establishes you as a credible and authoritative information source. It also boosts your online visibility while increasing your search engine ranking. With original and valuable content, you can earn high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites. Your website engagement, including comments and social shares, will likely rise when you create informative, educative, entertaining, and helpful content. This may result in more web traffic and better rankings.

When creating original content with value, know your audience and their preferred content. Speaking from experience, answering customer queries, and incorporating visuals in your content can help promote originality. Developing a successful content marketing strategy can also guide you through creating high-quality content. Content marketing experts like Matt Colletta can help create a winning content marketing strategy.

3. Give Depth to Thin Content

In-depth content discusses a topic in great detail, covering everything a reader might find helpful. When they rank for information-intent keywords, informational posts provide a good user experience because they contain every detail a user needs. While in-depth content covers topics in their entirety, it doesn’t mean posts should always be long. A whole topic can be covered in several paragraphs and be considered in-depth. In-depth content improves user signals, boosts rankings, earns more backlinks, and makes ranking high for long-tail keywords easier.

4. Replace Thin Articles and Blog Posts

If you have thin blog posts and articles, consider replacing them with new pieces. This gives you more power over the content’s message and tone. It also allows you to include long-tail keywords ranking for that subject. Once you replace an old article with a new one, redirect the old URL to the newly published piece to avoid 404 errors.

5. Remove or Delete Thin Content

Thin content negatively impacts your rankings, so consider deleting it from the site altogether. In case of duplicate articles, delete the one that doesn’t bring you much traffic and redirect the removed post’s URL to the article you decide to keep.

Endnote

Thin content is bad for SEO and the overall user experience. By using these tips, you can fix the issue and recover from its impact.