It is not enough! Thin content and technical website audit

Low value websites - what is thin content?

First of all, you must to understand that content really is the king. It is the most important ranking factor for the search engine, and above all it serves as an aid or incentive for the recipient. However, not everyone wants to spend time creating high-quality content. Many blogs and websites publish a lot of content that isn’t all that useful or informative, which will cause users to bounce after reading the first couple sentences. So if you can’t offer anything interesting, you have thin content.

How does thin content affect your website?

Thin content makes your site more likely to be penalized by Google. The search engine will view your page as being less trustworthy and relevant, leading to a lower ranking in search results. In addition, users will also not find your website as useful or informative because of the lack of information available on it.

How to find it? Technical SEO audit

Search engine crawlers crawl your site’s pages from back to front and from left to right. Crawlers read thin content just as much as full content. When the crawler gets a page of only text, it will continue crawling past the text-only page unless there is something at the bottom of the page that tells it to stop.

A technical SEO audit is a process which analyzes your site’s performance from a number of perspectives. It can look at everything from links and on-page text to crawlability and search engine visibility. It’s a great way to pinpoint potential issues before they cause serious problems. To identify thin content on your site, use a tool like Pingdom, Screaming Frog, or Moz. These are all search engine optimization tools that will allow you to crawl your website and provide feedback about how well optimized your site is for the engines.

What should you avoid?

Pages with automatically generated content

We are talking mainly about texts created with the use of various types of generators and synonymous articles, often saturated with keywords. Even though you don’t usually put these types of texts on your own subpages, remember that the quality of incoming links and the value of the content they surround affect your website’s ranking in Google. After identifying these texts, it is necessary to find a solution to decrease their number or completely eliminate them from the site (i.e., through redirects). For this purpose, we recommend two tools: Copyscape and Plagiarism Checker.

Too little unique content on the page and subpages that do not differ much from each other

In order to create a content strategy that optimizes your site for Google, the two main things you should be concerned with are how much unique content is on your page, and what differentiates it from other pages. If both of these are minimal, you might have a thin content problem. This type of issue will hurt your site if left unchecked because Google will see this as being deceptive and could penalize you or flag your website in their search results.

Another common error is duplicating descriptions in several subpages when presenting each variant of a product. Every subpage on your website should have a different type of content no matter how many there are. Instead of creating individual product descriptions, you might prefer to place them on one subpage so that your customers can select a specific option from one place.

Too high saturation of the content with keywords

One of the most common mistakes webmasters make is publishing too much content with high keyword saturation. This problem will lead to ranking issues, thin content, and a decrease in user engagement. High keyword saturation is defined as using the same word or phrase more than once in a page or paragraph for different keywords.

Hidden content

Here we are entering the field of Balck Hat SEO, which you need to quickly get away from. Some try to cheat algorithms by hiding the content or creating two versions of content: for robots and for users. This does not mean, however, that these activities cannot be detected – it is controlled by the so-called rateers, i.e. Google employees who manually verify websites.

Low value texts for users

It’s important to convey specific information to your readers to keep them on the site longer. Texts that convey generalized information are of no value and are not useful to your site visitors. In contrast, the technical specifications in product descriptions should not be complex. Therefore, it is not a good practice to include only complex technical specifications in product descriptions. You need to give the recipients additional information, that is fully understandable and useful.

How to resolve the problem of thin content?

You must do your best to prevent such content from falling into the hands of robots and readers / consumers. First, create high-quality content. Second, correct the ones that are of dubious quality (and as a last resort, if you cannot paraphrase them, delete them). Third, you can use rel = canonical or a 301 redirect. Avoid too many ads will also have their rank decreased. Don’t put more than two blocks of text in one sentence. Just find an intresting topic, and write. Let your imagination run wild, but don’t forget about substance.

Summary

In the end, a technical SEO audit can give you a better understanding of how your site stacks up to Google’s current algorithm. From there, you can take steps like implementing Schema markup, building out your site with targeted content and optimizing for mobile that will help you rank higher in search results. In addition, we recommend engaging a professional SEO consultant if you’re not already working with one because they’ll be able to identify even more ways to improve your site’s organic performance.