{"id":1329,"date":"2022-03-20T17:42:16","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T21:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spacebarcollective.com\/thin-content\/"},"modified":"2024-03-08T15:04:08","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T20:04:08","slug":"thin-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacebarcollective.com\/thin-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Thin Content Can Hurt Your Chances of Ranking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thin Content And SEO: A Brief History<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two major components of excellent SEO-driven content are relevance and authority. Your site will earn considerable traffic from providing relevant content that is genuinely helpful to your target audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until 2011 with Google\u2019s Panda algorithm update<\/a> that high-quality, high-relevant content became a major ranking factor. This update directly challenged the spammy, low-quality and untrustworthy content in an effort to better match search results with search intent. Prior to Panda, it was somewhat easy to rank with low-quality content, even with blogs as short as 200 words! Panda\u2019s purpose was to keep pages without valuable information from ranking (or at least, not as easily). Not only did it become harder to rank short-form content, but having lots of thin content on your site could actually hurt your rankings as well. To avoid potential ranking losses, it\u2019s become standard practice to either cull thin pages from your site or to implement content updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To better understand the decision between deleting or updating pages, it\u2019s best you start with learning what thin content is. This is the first step in addressing thin content issues on your site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is Thin Content Exactly?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thin content is short-form content that doesn\u2019t go in-depth or cover a topic enough to satisfy search intent. Thin content does not provide value to the reader and is therefore ranked poorly by search engines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"thin<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

What Makes Content “Thin”?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Google sees thin content as the lowest form of content with the most negligible value. From content stuffed with irrelevant keywords to possibly being stolen from a source, thin content portrays attributes that transgress Google’s Webmaster guidelines<\/a>. Some of the qualities that Google tags are thin content include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n