Get Ranking on Google for certain topics can sometimes be quite difficult. In fact, it is a real headache for website content writers who, however hard they try, fail to see results. The fact that Google detects thin content (and its effect on rankings) is an obstacle that has to be overcome every day, so you will want to know about it whether you own a website or write online for a living.
Thin content means empty content
One thing every writer and anyone with a website should be clear about is that nobody fools Google. To that end, its powerful Panda tool was launched years ago, and dozens of algorithms are constantly at work analyzing all indexed content. It penalizes empty, false content that does not add value for the user who consumes it. This is what is known as thin content.
It may attract readers at first, but in the end it turns out to be junk that does nothing more than fill space. It becomes a disappointment because it fails to meet the need the reader had when they found it.
This term should not be confused with duplicate content, because thin content does not have to be copied for Panda to consider it shallow and useless for the user, although both mistakes do cause rankings to be heavily penalized.
How is thin content created?
The thin content is not a new way of creating content. In fact, it has always been used. It can easily be generated in several ways:
- Content created by plugins. This is what we know as Black Hat SEO, that is, content that has been copied from third parties. It also includes content where we stuff keywords into “hidden” spaces, or spun content. It is outright deception, although Google has to use several factors to detect it and decide which version is the original.
- Low-value content. This is what you can find on affiliate sites linked to a main website. These are many pages with very similar content that all lead to one main site. The secondary or support sites offer nothing new. It is worth creating valuable, creative content so that it does not end up as affiliate content.
- Web scraping. This is the name for copying content or images that belong to third parties. It is a very common practice, but Panda is penalizing it more and more. That is why we recommend not creating different pages and domains for a single product or company; it is better to have one website with content designed specifically for it.
- Use doorway pages to rank on Google. Doorway pages feed misleading information to the search engine results page. They get the website ranked, but are of no use whatsoever to the user. This is one of the factors Panda penalizes most heavily and one of the main reasons the tool was created.
Google monitors and times how long a user spends reviewing a website's content. So it concludes that if users spend time on it, they find the content useful. Therefore, if you risk including thin content, it will affect your SEO and your website will drop in the ranking that Google uses to display results. Don't let Panda's opinion hurt your website: put in the hours to create clean, useful content for the end user. It is always worth it!