Home / Google / Thin Content for Google SEO in a Post-Panda 4.0 World

Thin Content for Google SEO in a Post-Panda 4.0 World

By John E Lincoln

In this post, we take a look at thin content.

Why do we Care about Thin Content?

According to Google, the Panda algorithm looks for thin content and devalues rankings for websites that have thin content. Because of this, people are afraid that they might have it on their website.

Google Wants your Content to be Beefy

Google Wants your Content to be Beefy

What is Thin Content?

Worried about thin content? This is what you should look for.

  • The majority of pages on the website have almost no HTML and text on them
  • Pages on your site that scrap content from other website
  • Pages on your site that have mix of content copied from other websites
  • Pages on your site that are all exactly the same with very small variations in keywords

Do Ecommerce and Category Based Sites Need to Worry

Websites that have many products and many categories are often worried about having thin content. Let’s take a look at some of the things that could be issues.

  • Many product pages with no descriptions, or descriptions that Google cannot read
  • Product pages that have the exact same descriptions the all the other webpages do online
  • Many categories that have nothing in them
  • Many categories that only have 0, 1 or 2 of the same products in them

What Should you do Now?

If your website has the symptoms above and was hurt by one of the Panda updates, you should do the following.

  • Consolidate content
  • Beef up the unique content on the website
  • Internally link the unique content
  • Get social shares and links pointing at the deep pages
  • Continue to build excellent content over time and improve the website
  • Eliminate any pages that are unnecessary

What about the Longtail?

For those of you who don’t know, many SEO’s like subcategories because they can allow websites to go after longtial search queries. For example, say that I search for. “Red Nike Shoes.”

We can see that Kohls.com has page optimized just for this. Ill bet they are selling a lot of red nike shoes with this page!

Kohls.comMy advice, you can of course still go after the longtail, if you have the products and text to support it.

About John E Lincoln

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, "The Forecaster Method" and "Digital Influencer." Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.