SEO: The Risk of 'Thin Content' Pages

The risks of 'duplicate content' pages are often discussed, and the topic of quality has been regularly featured in blog posts, seminars, and lectures in recent years. But what about 'thin content' pages, which also fall into the realm of low-quality content? Experts have been discussing for quite some time the impact such pages with minimal unique content can have on a domain, yet the general public is not widely aware of the risk. DejanSEO found that Google lists such thin content pages under soft 404 errors in Webmaster Tools. This is a good reason to take a closer look at the subject: What does 'thin content' mean, where does it typically appear, and how can it be avoided?

Server errors in Google Webmaster Tools

Where is 'Thin Content' Generated?

When a page has little unique content, meaning there is barely anything beyond the site-wide elements (navigation, footer, etc.), it's referred to as a 'thin content' page. Blogs and shop systems in their default settings generally create such pages almost automatically. Examples include (almost) empty tag pages in a blog (where there is either no content or just a single blog post listed), blog posts with very little content (for instance, containing only an image), (empty) author pages in blogs, product pages or variants without descriptive text in a shop, or empty search result pages.

It has long been known that Google can negatively rate such pages, but their display as soft 404 errors in Webmaster Tools is new. It is helpful that webmasters receive detailed information about which pages might be problematic and can therefore target these pages for improvements.

How to Avoid Such Pages

As a general rule, 'thin content' pages should be set to 'noindex', but the analysis by DejanSEO indicates that some of the pages delivered as 404 errors were already 'noindex' pages. Therefore, this measure seems insufficient. What should be done, then?

The first step is to analyze which category the identified pages fall into and whether they are dispensable for the domain. For instance, empty tag pages can be removed and, if necessary, their URLs redirected to the most relevant URL. For pages that serve a purpose and cannot or should not be removed, it should be assessed whether they can be enriched with relevant content. Tag pages with little content that are to be kept could be given a small, unique description, product pages can be supplemented with individual product descriptions (also for user-friendliness and conversion optimization reasons), search result pages should be excluded from crawling via robots.txt and additionally from indexing, and 'thin' blog posts could be enhanced with additional content.

And if you haven't received any such soft 404 errors in Webmaster Tools yet? It is, in any case, sensible to check your own domain for 'thin content' to prevent downgrades and at the same time improve user-friendliness.

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