What is Thin Content and How to Fix Low Quality PagesHow to recover from Google Panda and Helpful Content updates and Adsense quality policy violations after being hit with thin content.
When the Helpful Content update hit in late 2022, I started noticing a gradual decline in visits. Week on week, month on month traffic was down. Google's own release notes state that "due to algorithm changes you may notice changes, don't worry nothing is broken, no need to fix anything". A few weeks later I started receiving the dreaded "You need to fix some issues before your site is ready for AdSense" messages from AdSense. On investigation the issue is "Thin content".
My sites have been running well since 2003 in one form or another. I started with one site, and as the content grew I split it up into smaller, more focused niche sites. They have been going well and running steady for years, yet when Google released the Helpful Content Update in late 2022 I started noticing a significant drop in traffic across all sites. Similar Google Panda updates had no noticeable effect on traffic, but this helpful content update has really hammered my rankings.
As of the time of writing I have lost 85% of my traffic, and now I'm getting AdSense policy violations for thin content just as my overall site traffic nose dives off a cliff.
What is thin content, what is quality content? How do you define value? Is there a specific word count you need to hit, or a set of guidelines you need to reach? What does Google want from me?
What is Thin Content?
Thin content refers to pages on your website that have little to no value for your audience. This can include pages with very little text, duplicate content, or content that is not relevant to your website's overall theme. Google's algorithm penalises websites with thin content, so it's important to ensure that your website provides valuable information to your audience.
Google's policy documentation defines thin content as pages having little or no value to the user, like doorway pages, low-quality affiliate pages, or simply pages with very little or no content. The release notes for the Google Helpful Content Update states “The system automatically identifies content that seems to have little value, low-added value or is otherwise not particularly helpful to people.”
Are Short Pages with Low Word Count Considered Thin Content?
Those definitions are actually quite vague, generic, subjective and not much help. How do you define and measure thin or low value content? I have no doorway pages or affiliate pages, so is thin content then based on word count? On my 6 sites, ~84% of articles are over 800 words, 93% over 600. The remainder are gallery pages (photo heavy) or simple contact, directions, sitemap type pages which are not indexed nor do they serve AdSense content.
I don't believe content length is to blame, especially since one of my highest ranking pages is <200 words and has a high bounce rate. It does answer a question in which the user can copy/paste the solution into their app and never come back to my page. That at least gives an indication as to what being [italic]helpful[/italic] is about. [underline]Pages should provide visitors with an answer to their search[/underline]. A 200 word article that gets to the point and provides the required information is better than a 1000 word article full of waffle and spun content to pad out the text.
AI Generated Content is Thin Content
Reading online about similar issues, and the Google Helpful Content Update, I can further refine my definition of thin content. It seems like AI generated content is considered thin and likely to be not indexed or satisfy AdSense policy, but my site has no AI generated, scripted, spun, automatic or any other type of scraped content. I wrote each and every article myself. Whilst this may not be the case for me, for others using AI content it may be a good idea to go back and remove or rewrite it.
Poor Spelling and Grammar is Thin Content
Copy quality should also be good. I use Grammarly for spelling and grammar checking, my site has a bunch of on-page SEO criteria for each page including title length, keyword density for target phrase, content length, readability, broken link checker, content is not duplicated. I write all my content for the user, not the search engine. Content is specific to the site topic. I don't believe that is the problem.
Unprofessional Website Template / Theme / Logo Can Have Little Value
Some forum users report that the website template/theme can look unprofessional, or having a poor quality logo can affect AdSense approval. I believe my sites look good, have relevant categories and structure, logos are decent, pages are structured with appropriate headings and paragraphs, navigation is clear and simple. I don't think this is the reason, but please let me know if there are issues with my site!
Show Expertise in Your Field
Writing about my expertise, specialities or experience seems to be a relevant ranking factor, at least for the helpful content update. I'm not sure how to indicate experience to Google, but then they gather so much information about us anyway. Google probably already knows I'm a professional software engineer and web developer with 20 years experience and a self employed photographer with diplomas in astronomy, computer science and neuro-linguistic programming. My understanding is that articles should be written in a way that involves me sharing my knowledge and experience, and demonstrate usage of tools or equipment, rather than a generic page about something unrelated to my site which anyone can copy & paste from Wikipedia. I guess the secret is to make it personal.
How I Fixed My Thin Content
So what does Google want from me? How do I get back my lost visitors and regain AdSense approval?
I started by going through each and every page on each website one by one, pruning or refreshing all old content. I merged several similar pages and added suitable redirects to new pages, and interlinked pages and sites when useful to the user. I ran every single page through Grammarly to check for spelling mistakes and grammar, and although I do this whilst writing, I must have either skipped some pages or made some edits without, as there were some typos and poor grammar to be fixed.
I took a good look at my pages which have <300 words and very few (or no) visits. Some of these I merged into larger pages or included as a new heading in existing pages. Others were so old and outdated I just deleted them (who wants Windows 98 tips these days?). I put redirects in place for each page removed. I added more images, videos, infographics, and interactive elements to articles to make my content more engaging, which also has the effect of breaking up long blocks of text and makes it easier for readers to consume. I took the decision to de-index my gallery pages since they have hardly any words on them aside from some image captions. I don't consider them to be key content I want to drive visitors to, and galleries are linked to from content if a visitor wants to see my photos. I also added anoindex to category pages as these also serve no usefulness to be indexed, in fact they can be classified as duplicate content since they repeat the article excerpts and headings.
I also took a good look at the comments on pages. I don't know if Google sees comments separately from page content or if it considers the page as a whole, but some comments have a lot of spelling and grammar errors, others have little to no value - "nice article!" type of comment. I corrected bad spelling and grammar and removed poor quality comments that added nothing to the overall experience of the user. This seemed like a sensible thing to do to improve the overall page quality and ensure that any content is value content.
After a few weeks I submitted my sites for review again in AdSense and regained approval, and I also noticed an increase in visitors, nowhere near where it was before the updates but the graph is trending upwards. Fingers crossed my experience with thin content can help others in a similar situation recover from penalties and AdSense policy violations as well.
How To Fix Thin Content in a Nutshell
In summary to recover from AdSense policy violation for thin content, or from the helpful content update you need to:
- Provide more content, but fewer pages. Prune short pages or merge into larger.
- Content needs to be high quality, unique and provide a positive experience for the user.
- Avoid scraping, spinning and AI generated content.
- The content must be consistent with the theme of the website, for example on my photography site I'm not going to write about weight-training because it is irrelevant to people visiting a photography website.
- Content needs to be kept up-to-date and refreshed regularly, or removed when it becomes obsolete.
- Check and double check your content for spelling and grammar errors.
- Use
noindexon content that has little value but you want to keep. - Take a critical look at your sites theme and logo, redesign if cluttered, has errors or doesn't flow well.
- Write about what you know, don't write about subjects you have no knowledge or experience in as you will just be scraping other sites content.
- Consider page comments as content and apply the same rules. Don't blindly approve comments without reading, checking or correcting.
