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Have you been receiving penalties for thin content? Thin content dates back to the start of the 21st century. During the early years, websites didn’t require many keyword-optimized pages.
The amount of content needed to rank well in search engines was minimal. Ever since Google introduced Panda in 2011 to fight low-quality content things changed, however. It made life difficult for the SEO community.
There is more information about thin content and how to recover google penalty negative rankings in this post. As well as tips to fix poor quality content and make sure thin content doesn’t affect your website again.
What Is Thin Content?
One reason you may not be ranking well in search engines may be that your content is irrelevant or doesn’t have any value for the reader. This is what we refer to when we talk about thin content. Thin content is usually short but it can also be extensive.
Thin content includes some of the following:
- Product page with no item description
- Scraped content
- Duplicated content
- Affiliate pages
- Localization is done with doorway pages, (where you have a page for each local keyword)
- Extensive and lengthy content which doesn’t add any value
There are different types of penalties and search engines usually can tell which content is thin and will deindex the page in some cases. Most commonly though you will get a manual action penalty that reads something like “Thin content with little or no added value”. Your website can be impacted by a manual penalty or by triggering an algorithm.
Understanding the difference between them is important. This will determine how to proceed in developing a recovery strategy. Below are a few guiding tips to recover google penalty negative rankings:
- First, make sure there is a ranking problem. Make sure a penalty is the cause of your issues
- Does your content add value?
- Will the provided content answer a reader’s question?
- Does your content meet search intent?
- Investigate and research recent algorithm updates
- Start an SEO audit
- Run an audit on your Content
- Clean up your backlinks
To answer a viewer’s questions, you should aim to have at least 300 words of content. The reader needs to feel like all their questions were answered and ready to walk away with new knowledge.
Make sure to provide links to some of your sources. Visual content will also help your readers better understand your content too.
