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.

Typical issues with ecommerce product pages

Content issues curse many sites on the web. Ecommerce sites are particularly at risk, mainly due to issues that can stem from hosting hundreds or thousands of product pages.

Typical issues with ecommerce product pages are:

• Duplicate content.

• Thin content.

• Too much content .

Left unrestrained, these issues can negatively impact your site's performance in the SERPs.

If you run an ecommerce site and you've seen traffic flat-line, gradually erode, or fall off a cliff recently, then product page content issues may be the offender.

Let's take a closer look at some of the most common content woes that plague ecommerce sites, and recommendations on how to can fix them.

Duplicate Content

There are usually three types of duplicate content we encounter on ecommerce sites:

• Derivative versions of the manufacturer's product descriptions.

• Sole descriptions that are duplicated across multiple versions of the same product.

• Inquiry strings generated from faceted navigation.

Copied product descriptions

A large degree of ecommerce resellers copy their generic product descriptions directly from the manufacturer's website. This is a big no-no. In the age of Panda, publishing copied or duplicated content diagonally your site will weigh your site down in the SERPs like a battleship secure.

How to fix it

The solution here is to author unique product descriptions for every product on your site. If budget is a matter, prioritize and get fresh content written for your highest edge product pages first and work backwards.

Sole yet duplicated product descriptions

With many ecommerce sites, site owners have authored original product descriptions, which is unbelievable. Where they run into trouble is they sell multiple versions of the same product and each product version has a different page/URL with the same boilerplate description.

Thin Content

Even if a site has 100 percent unique product descriptions, they can frequently be on the thin side .Now, product pages with light content can still rank well where field strength helps supersede potential thin content issues.

But most sites don't have the back link profiles of Amazon or Zappos, and I like to think in terms of risk/reward. Thickening up descriptions makes sense because:

• It can decrease any risk that thin content issues might negatively impact SERP visibility

• It adds more content for engines to crawl, which means more opportunities for your page to rank for a wider basket of search queries.

• It freshens up your page, and freshening up your content can absolutely pay dividends with Google.

How to fix it

Some of the traditions you can address thin content on your ecommerce product pages contain:

• Enable user reviews and feedback. User-generated content is free and helps set up your content with naturally-written text. This additional content can help get better potential relevancy scoring, time on page, user engagement levels, and can help the product page rank for a broader basket of search queries. Also, user reviews recommend social proof and can improve conversion rates as well.

• Write some additional, original content. You can hire a author to help thicken up these pages with extra features and benefits, or you can do it yourself. Again, given it could be very expensive to thicken up every product page on the site, you can prioritize your highest margin products first.

• Pulling in mashups of links/text of similar products, product accessories, special offers and newly viewed items is another way to add more content to a page, and a tactic many larger ecommerce sites use.

Too Much Content

Saying that a site has "too much content" may sound opposing to the issue of having content that's too thin. But when I say an ecommerce site may have too much content, I'm really talking about two distinct issues:

• Too many product pages.

• Improper treatment of paginated product pages.

And specifically how having too many pages of low value content can cause PageRank and crawl budget problems.

Too many product pages

This is really an addendum to the duplicate content issues posed by faceted routing or hosting several versions of the same product on different pages.

Aside from low value content concerns, hosting a mass of duplicated product pages dilutes your site's PageRank or link equity, which weakens its overall ranking power of your significant content.

Improper handling of paginated product pages

Another concern of hosting "too many pages" is not handling pagination correctly. Often times, ecommerce sites can have product categories containing hundreds or thousands of products that span multiple pages.

How to fix

Some of the ways to address equity intensity or crawl budget issues that can stem from too many product pages include:

• Rel=next, rel=previous: This markup tells Google to take care of ecommerce product listings spanning multiple pages in a logical sequence, thus consolidating link equity  with all pages in the series.

• Canonicalization: It's efficient for consolidating link properties, but it won't solve possible crawl budget issues, since Googlebot will still crawl all your dupe content.

• "Noindex, follow": If your goal is to optimize crawl budget and keep duplicates or pagination out of the index, use brute force and block Googlebot via robots "noindex, follow" meta edict.