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.