Thin content on your website: how to find it and how to fix it

Since Google’s Panda algorithm, pages with thin content do not rank well on Google’s search result pages. How do you identify thin content on your web pages, and what should you do with that content?

identify thin content on your website

What is thin content?

Thin content pages are pages with less than 300-400 words that do not have a clear focus. Some people also consider unoptimized pages, duplicate pages and outdated pages thin content.

How to identify thin content on your web pages

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler helps you to find thin content pages on your website. Just run a website audit and then open the page ‘Content topics’ in the audit report:

how to identify thin content

The audit report shows thin content pages on your website, and it also shows the top keywords that are used on your web pages.

What you should do with your thin content pages

There are four strategies for dealing with thin content pages: do nothing, update the pages, redirect the pages, or removing the pages.

1. Do nothing

You don’t have to do anything if the page gets many website visitors and/or if the page is ranked well on Google and other search engines. Of course, the content of the page should be up-to-date.

2. Update the page

If the content of the page is relevant but not up to date, update the page to make sure that it is relevant to your current offerings.

If the content is relevant but not detailed enough, add more information about the topic on the page. Make sure that the web page plays a relevant role in converting visitors on your website.

Updating content is less work than creating new content. In additions, the old pages usually contain some backlinks. When updating a page, you can also add videos, infographics and other content that makes the page more linkworthy.

3. Redirect the page

If you have another page on your website that contains a better version of the same content, just redirect the thin content page to the rich-content page.

4. Remove the page

If the content of a page is outdated, or if it does not comply with current regulations, it might be a good idea to remove the page from your website.

This should only be done if it is not possible to redirect the old page to another page of your website that is up-to-date.

Check your web pages regularly

Updating or replacing content that doesn’t provide value for your customers is always a good idea. You should also check the redirects on your website. One bad redirect can lead to massive problems.

The website audit tool in SEOprofiler regularly checks your web pages and it informs you about all issues that can have a negative impact on your rankings:

Check your pages now

Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.