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Thin Content Could Kill Your Blog – 5 Tips To Avoid Certain Death

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One of the biggest clichés in the SEO industry is that content is king, and although it’s true that posting a wealth of articles on your site can boost your Google rankings, it can do more harm than good.

Why? Because quality is hugely more important than quantity. It is now incredibly easy to scrape, spin and upload content from all over the web. In fact, it is possible to build a huge collection of articles for your blog with little more than a few mouse clicks.

As so often with SEO techniques, the easier it sounds the more damage it’s going to do to your site in the long term. Scraping and spinning content has always been frowned upon by Google and last year it really clamped down on webmasters who had been making use of these methods with its Penguin update.

Google’s overall aim is to make it easy for people to find the information they are looking for and, quite rightly, it sees no value in boosting the profile of sites which have “borrowed” their content from elsewhere.

Thin content is content which doesn’t add value to a website – it might be a 300 word post which has been spun 20 times and littered across the web, it might be a 1,000 word article which just rehashes something from Wikipedia or it might be an infographic full of inaccurate statistics.
So how can you avoid creating or posting thin content?

1 – Be aware of thin content in all its forms

There’s a misconception that if an article is long, it’s good and will contribute positively to rankings. This isn’t the case. Google takes into account things like bounce rate when calculating search engine results, so if people are clicking on and off your articles almost instantly because they don’t offer the information they want it doesn’t matter if the piece is 200 or 2,000 words long, it’s not going to rank well.

2 – Find out what people liked and give them more of it

A good rule of thumb is that if something is popular, then it isn’t thin content. There are a range of tools which can be used to discover what worked well. Checking page views and bounce rate in Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to start. Using social media metrics is a great idea too as shareability it a great sign that your content is hitting the spot. Of course, you don’t want to churn out the same article over and over again, but by finding out what sort of articles are popular with your audience, you can steer content creation in that direction. You might discover “how to” articles are outperforming “top five” articles and so produce more of the former. But remember – you don’t want to end up repeatedly covering the same topics in the same way.

3 – Bad content producers steal, great content producers steal ideas

Just lifting someone else’s article and passing it off as your own, even after a hefty rewrite, is a sure fire way to end up with thin content – but that doesn’t mean you can’t seek out inspiration from elsewhere. If you spot an infographic and know you could have done better, then do it better. The key is to add value – don’t rehash someone else’s ideas, improve them. You can see for miles by standing on the shoulders of giants.

4 – You have to add value all over your site

It’s tempting to fall in to the trap of thinking actual blog entries are the only place you need to worry about thin content, but if you have landing pages you need to spend just as much time thinking about them. One of the biggest problems here is the desire to include plenty of keywords in these locations, something which can limit the quality of content. You may need to think outside the box to make the most of your landing pages. However, taking the time to introduce something extra will pay dividends in the long run.

5 – Keep up with the Joneses

Content creation and SEO are fast moving areas and what is seen as best practice can change from month to month. By keeping an eye on leading publications such as Search Engine Journal you won’t miss out on vital developments. You’ll also pick up more than a few ideas along the way.

Finally, it’s important to bear in mind that you’re writing for readers, not for Google. The search engine is just an intermediary, not the end user. By thinking about what people want, rather than what crawler robots want then you’re more likely to produce content that’s a hit.

By being aware of what thin content is, you can make sure you don’t post it to your blog. You should make sure you apply the same stringent standards to guest writers and to yourself. If you don’t think a post is good enough, don’t set it live. It’s as simple as that.

Will Stevens is an experienced journalist and SEO expert who provides content for the Webfusion blog team as well as working on a range of other projects.

Comments

  1. Content has always been king with Google, but there have always been a lot of websites that know how to manipulate their sites to succeed. They play on the edge and most of them will get caught. I just remember when some of the biggest content websites got hit with Panda and they didn’t know what to do. They were producing 100 articles a day, but they were all worthless at best. I don’t cry for them. I have to focus on my content and online marketing techniques.
    AC Repairing

  4. a very nice article Mitz,
    its always been said that the content is king and if anyone produce the content which will disguise the visitors then he might not perform well in Google search ranks. also you’ve mentioned the concept of bounce rate and all. so Google has many methods to determine the quality content..,
    Rohit recently posted..Top Budget Smartphones under 10K price range | 2013

  5. I loved the line you said about stealing the idea., because most of the blogs are writing the same content that a good site publish and republish that into their blogs.., which is a bad practice and will lead to the DMCA complaint and removal of url form Google search or even worst…
    Anamika recently posted..Tips to Improve Computer Performance

  6. Awesome post with great information and I really enjoyed this post while reading and this post surely gonna help all the newbies. I really like the third point and Yes, before writing a post we have to search all the things related to our post and then after research we have to start writing a post. Thanks for sharing such useful tips.
    Sudipto recently posted..Best Love Stories Of All Time

  7. I admire the valuable information you offered in your article. Excellent submission very good post.
    All points are really helpful but the last one is really most important. Agree with the post of saqib that “No one seems to be talking about this and everyone encourages to create more and more content”

  11. Hey Mitz, very useful and informative article about thin content. All the points described above seems good and you are right. There is really a big misconception a long size of article will give a better rank on Google. Article maybe confined upto limited words but the main thing is quality. Visitors will also return to the same page if quality of the post is really good.
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  14. Thanks for sharing what thin contents are. I have a group of writers that write articles for me and I do believe that this article would help them or will certainly inspire them to be more mindful of the quality of their content.
    James D. recently posted..Part 6: What You Should Now Know

  15. I have a blog. Thanks to your article I have to reduce my contents. Never heard anything about this before. Your article taught me a lot of things about blogs. Keep up the good work.

  17. i like the words ‘ writing for readers, not for Google.’ especially for the peoples who love to speak their minds..and what about commercial website/blog? they dont have to build a huge collection of articles for their blog, do you have tips about it?
    toridetop recently posted..DAFTAR HARGA SEWA MOBIL MURAH DEPOK

    • I think a commercial site is focused on a companies services or products and most of the writing is done for promoting that fact.

  18. Value addition principle as you have indicated can make someone to end up with an awesome article. Adding value to what has already been published elsewhere can make someone to save a lot of time and end up with content that will increase reputation. The secret lies in combining ideas from various sources to produce an output that is unique. It is always rewarding to dedicate some time towards creating good content rather than doing copy and paste work.
    Big Time Blogging recently posted..Crash Your Servers: Traffic Generation Tips Used By Millionaire Bloggers

  19. “Find out what people liked and give them more of it” great & effective point of article, I’m 100% agree this valuable point. People always demand unique & fresh things & if they get what they want than it’s amazing thing.

  24. This is a great post on 5 Tips To Avoid Certain Death. This post surely would help a lot bloggers out there. Your insights are great.

  25. The world is not perfect and blogs are not perfect either, unfortunately… To stuff your blog with all kinds of info is not wise at all and it has to be written on every WordPress/Joomla or other CMS for blogging…
    This is must read article for everyone who wants to start a personal blog to avoid so widespread opinion that content is the king!
    Evan recently posted..Premium Gaming WordPress themes 2013

  26. Fabulous post on thin content! I have heard that Google prefers to call the so called “thin content” pages as “low quality” pages. Trying to generate user comments and reviews on product specific pages also enhances the variety and relevancy of content for the product page in the eyes of search engines especially for eCommerce sites where pages are said to have thin content. This tips which you have provided here are very informative and helpful. Thanks for sharing it.
    Stenn recently posted..Medical wellbeing

    • Yes we all know what thin content looks like and I think Google knows too! It is very easy to pick out. 🙂

  27. It is true that some bloggers steal content. Therefore, it is good to use a service such as the DMCA or Myfreecopyright. People also steal videos on youtube. Once I uploaded my video on youtube and in a few hours it was aploaded on youtube four times from four different users 🙂
    Petr Bednarik recently posted..How to create a membership website

    • I want my videos to be used on sites but I do not like them downloading it and editing the footage to make their own. That is not good!

  29. Nice tips regarding the content if someone wants to improve the blog quality than they should look for the quality of the content they are providing to their visitors.
    Julia Argan recently posted..שרתים

  31. Stolen ideas are always injurious to online community. If all writers will spin articles, real value of the contents will be lost. The best idea for quality contents is to go for deep research and then write something.
    Maja recently posted..A Chance to Avail the Coupons

  32. Thanks for sharing this insightful article with us. It can make a person lazy if anybody consistently doing same thing over and over again.I personally think that you provide us some new trends in blogging that can be exiting and innovative. I am trying this out.

  34. I absolutely agree to this — “quality is hugely more important than quantity” because what’s the use of so much but doesn’t have any meaning to it. This post surely would help a lot bloggers out there. Your insights are great. And thank you for the tips, it sure does helped me a lot. Thank you for the great information.

  35. Hi Mitz,

    Really great point “Bad content producers steal, great content producers steal ideas”. Focus on offering best solution to any problem no matter if many people have already offered the solution. If you can make it best then you can easily outrank them. What you say Mitz ?
    Pankaj recently posted..Mobile Recharge Software

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