Significance of Thin Content

What is Thin Content?
Google helps us to know how our sites should behave via their Webmaster Guidelines. While this is a regurgitation of common sense for those who know how not to be an uber-spammer it doesn't help us to get a handle on what thin content truly is.

How to Assess Thinness

 
Thin content in many cases is not as clear as understanding that you do not scrape copy from other sites or exist to collective content. You need to take a detailed look at the mission of your content, what purpose it serves, and how your visitors digest and connect with your content.
Common SEO tactics of the early 2000s are no longer relevant; there is no need to build content solely for keyword rankings instead of providing added value to users.

Screaming Frog

 
Run a URL scrape of the site and export this list to sort URLs by word count. Also sort URLs by folder. Are you seeing that half of your blog content features posts that are 250 words? This is thin content.

Google Analytics

 
Review All Pages section and sort by exit rate. For those pages you see that aren't particularly expected to usher an exit, what you had expected to have a better user acceptance, are you seeing 75 percent or higher bounce rates? This is thin content.

This data is telling us that users aren't getting what you might expect out of page. Granted, you may have scientific issues, too many external links opening in the same window, or other SEO mistakes occurring, but at least you'll understand where to adjust your focus.

Open Site Explorer

Review the backlinks for your domain. Step into the Top Pages tab to gain an accepting for what content on your site is receiving links. You may find that what links you do possess are to the homepage and high level pages and that there are pages or site sections with no real link authority.

When you export this list also take note of page level associated tweets, Facebook shares and likes, and Google+ +1's. Again, this may collect information on what content of your site lacks authority from a social or buzz perspective. Google is looking at these factors as well to gauge the latent for thinness.

Do Bots Value Your Content?

 
We have a beautiful good feel for what thin content may exist on our site, but let's take Google's lead on what but be thin in their eyes.

Take a trip back into Google Analytics or make your way to Google Webmaster Tools. We will want to take a look at the last three months of Landing Page idea data. Export this and sort by folder. Are there folders of your site that you are noticing which hold little impression value?
We're going to do another task with much the same intention.

Where to Put Your interest?

The development above identified thin content and inversely it also showed us what isn't thin. Take a look at those pages and site sections that hold authority, great search presence, and user commitment, and take notes. This are the personal guidelines you will have for reviewing the thin content you have found.

What to Do With the Thin Content?
 

You're going to have to gaze at each page or folder of thin content and ask yourself a few questions:
 

•    Should it die/redirect? If there is no genuine value for this page anymore, let's not allow this content to impede users, or dilute internal link juice or crawl budget anymore.
 

•    Should you revive a section? If the content is just poorly written and has aesthetic issues you just may have to do some tweaking in order to revive this content.
 

•    Should you no index? If you feel that even though the content is thin it still may benefit some users or is a part of the conversion course then this may need to stay. Let's go ahead and meta robots leave out these pages though so that we are taking them away from search crawler view.
 

•    Should you reduce internal linking? The page holds some value but doesn't do well and you just can't seem to part ways with it. In the least begin to shrink internal linking to this page so it isn't in the common route of search engine crawling as well as a distraction for site users.

Conclusion
 

You may have been scratching your head as to why your overall site performance hasn't been doing well and on the other hand not looked genuinely enough past perceived success to see what page/section opportunities exist. This process will let you to find what thin content exist on site, but also what quality content exists to help mold your personal site standards of content quality.

Google's Page Layout Algorithm expansion

 Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, announced that Google has released a revive of its Page Layout Algorithm. The filter, also known as the Top Heavy algorithm, downgrades the ranking of a web page with too many ads at the top or if the ads are deemed too distract for users.

Cutts said the algorithm was revitalized. Here’s his tweet:

This would be the third established update to the Top Heavy algorithm.

Background On & improving From Top Heavy

What is the page layout algorithm? As we quoted from Google initially:

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s hard to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content correct away.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be artificial by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of noticeable content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real assets to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

See also our original article for when Top Heavy was first released, for advice about how a site that’s fixed may have to wait until the next release for any changes it’s made to restore rankings.

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How Algorithm Updates influence SEO

It isn’t difficult to look back at current algorithm updates from Google and evaluate how each one has altered the role of an SEO. In the simplest sense, Panda forced us to become better writers and researchers. Penguin made us alter the way we build links. Most recently, although it was less of an algorithm update and more of an communications change to Google’s core algorithm, Hummingbird asked us to consider conversational search queries in the content we produce.

Regardless of how small an algorithm update may be, the development and growth of an SEO’s tasks can be traced back through the history of updates. The fact that SEO is so dependent on updates creates quite a bit of uncertainty in the industry. But hey, as SEOs we know that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes!

The only confidence is that things will be dissimilar tomorrow.

Saying an SEOs role has changed in the last five to 10 years is an understatement. SEOs are tasked with more each year and the definition of SEO has broadened significantly. It’s become nearly impossible to be a one-man (or woman) show. It requires a team with a number of different skills to perform quality SEO today.

How SEO has Changed

There used to be a time when SEO was strictly about getting traffic to a website. It didn’t matter how it was done as long as it was accomplished.

That was a long time ago.

Today the role of an SEO is much more than attracting visitors. It’s about conversions. It’s about building a brand, having a social media presence, and producing unique, high quality content better than anyone else in your industry.

Why is this happening? It’s simple – Google wants it. Aside from making money, Google wants it’s users to find the best search results possible. How do you weed out the good sites from the bad sites? Make it tough for the bad sites to compete. Google is accomplishing this through their algorithm updates.

This is well beyond the scope of early SEO that built-in keyword research, generic, keyword-stuffed content production, site convenience, and link building.

Staying practical beside Algorithms

The difference between great SEOs and ordinary SEOs is that the great ones have a sense of what the upcoming holds. They’re able to look into their crystal ball and plan for potential algorithms that may lie in front. What’s their secret? It’s experience. There is a good possibility that at one time or another they were penalized for their SEO practices and have a full understanding of the power of Google.

Here are a few things you can do to stay proactive:

•    Don’t have a one-dimensional backlink profile. An example would be a site that has mainly built links through guest posting. While guest posting is a great way to link build, your backlink profile is supposed to look normal. Having a site with backlinks primarily coming from one source is an obvious sign to Google that you’re trying to influence rankings. Instead make an effort to switch up your link building strategy. For every guest post you write, try to get a couple of directory links and a few blog comments as well. Some consider directory links and blog commenting outdated link building tactics but they’re still helpful as long as they’re relevant links on quality sites. select carefully where you build these links and if you’re going to leave a comment make sure you are contributing to the discussion.

•    It’s always a good time to clean up your backlink profile. If you actually want to be proactive with link building, don’t wait for the next update to get rid of bad links. We all have a few links we’re not proud of and it’s best to remove them now before it’s too late. Do you best to have these links removed by contacting webmasters and if that doesn’t work then use Google’s disavow tool. Still Google stresses to use this tool after all other attempts have failed.

•    Diversify your attach texts. This shouldn’t be breaking news to anyone but if you haven’t already made an attempt to vary your anchor texts when link building then there is no better time to start than today. This goes back to building a natural backlink profile. A site that has the best part of its links coming from one or two anchor texts is another sign to Google that your links are unnatural.

•    Be significant in everything you do. The importance of relevancy for Google isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Whether you’re producing content or building links, staying applicable to your niche is vital to maintaining ranks and satisfying Google.

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