Thin content refers to website pages that offer little or no added value to visitors.
In other words, they don’t address search intent or help users complete a task.
Low content pages can have a low word count. But other types of low content are:
Bare-bones affiliate pages with little original content that focus primarily on promoting affiliate products without adding substantial value
Content copied from other sources without permission or attribution, which does not provide unique insights.
Pages created exclusively to rank for specific keywords, often resulting in similar or duplicate content throughout the site.
Posts written by guests who semrush com persistent used to have no expertise
Originality, or relevance to your site’s audience
Low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence
Thin content violates Google ‘s spam policies , which can lead to penalties (manual actions ). And it can significantly impact your search engine optimization (SEO ).
Google’s crackdown on poor content began with the mom database Panda algorithm update in 2011. The goal was to demote sites with poor content and improve user experience (UX).
Although the Panda update is more than 12 years old
Google still uses its core values as part of its ranking systems today.
For example, you may be familiar with the concept of EEAT .
EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Reliability.
Google uses the EEAT as part of its Search Evaluator Guidelines to help raters evaluate whether search ranking systems provide useful and relevant information.
For this reason, it is essential to get rid of inconsistent content
an infographic explaining the meaning of EEAT.
How Thin Content Hurts Your SEO
In addition to violating Google’s guidelines, thin content negatively impacts your SEO strategy in several ways:
Thin content provides a poor user experience . It fails to smartphones may be photography engage visitors and signals to search engines that your content is not valuable.
Poor content is often poorly organized and lacks structure . This makes it difficult for users to find the information they need.
Multiple pages targeting the same keywords can lead to keyword cannibalization . Which can confuse search engines about which page to rank.
Google has two main ways to semrush com persistent used to detect and penalize poor content:
Algorithmically, through core updates and aleart news ranking systems
Issuing a manual penalty
Ranking systems now prioritize useful, trustworthy, and people-oriented content that is created to benefit people rather than to gain SEO rankings.
Google’s algorithm is constantly moving in search results. But the algorithm is not perfect.
That’s why it sometimes issues a manual penalty.