>>Matt: Hi everybody.
If you've gotten a message about thin content with little or no added value, I wanted to
take a few minutes to explain what that means, give you some context and help you understand
if you, if you get that message in our free webmaster console.
So, hopefully the phrase "Thin content with little or no added value" is relatively intuitive
but let's walk through some examples of the sorts of things we would consider to fall
into that category.
A simple example would be doorways.
So, this could vary everywhere from the classic doorway page where somebody is just making
a ton of different pages, each one for a very slightly different phrase or a different keyword
and you land on the page and it says, "click here to enter" on a big button or something
like that.
But you also have more subtle doorway pages.
So, we ran into a Direct TV installer in Denver, for example, and that installer would say,
"Well, I install for every city in Colorado.
So I'm gonna make a page for every single city in Colorado and if it's, you know, Boulder
or if it's, you know, it's Aspen or whatever, I do Direct TV installs in all those."
And if you were to just land on that page, it might look relatively reasonable but if
you were to look at four or five of those pages you'd quickly see that the only difference
between them was the city and that's something that we would consider a doorway as well and
not as useful.
So doorways are definitely one type of thin content.
Another one that we often see and is relatively common, maybe the most common by volume, is
thin affiliates.
So, an affiliate program is when on your website you refer someone to go purchase a product,
usually somewhere else, and then you get a certain amount of that money back.
So, it might be five percent of all purchases that someone makes if they go off to another
shopping site, for example.
Now, affiliates can absolutely add value, you know, if you're reviewing text books and
you had six books this last semester and you talked about the pros and cons of this one.
Linear Algebra is good on this one but I didn't like Introduction to Algorithms and then you
have an affiliate link to Amazon, that's still something where you're adding value, people
are really reading a hard won bit of wisdom that you have learned from that textbook and
that you have written in your review.
A thin affiliate is something a little bit different.
It typically is when someone is just grabbing an affiliate feed, so these are, an affiliate
feed is when you have descriptions of different products that the merchant makes available
and someone just grabs that and they just throw it up on the website, they don't change
the copy, they don't add any original insight or research or analysis or reviews or videos
or any of the things that we would consider to be adding value.
So, if you have a thin affiliate site, often times you're competing with a ton of other
sites which are cookie cutter sites and a good question to ask yourself is, "If I land
on this page, my page, what's the added value of that versus landing on someone else's affiliate
page?
Or even landing directly on the merchant and being able to purchase directly?"
So, thin affiliates are relatively common things because affiliate feeds are very easy
to grab and if you can get traffic and just send people, then you can make a certain amount
of money.
Another very common thing that will receive this is sort of what we call thin syndication.
So, syndication is when you're pulling in content from other places and it, as well,
can be totally fine but you'll often see people who just go to a low quality article bank
or article marketing site or something that's just offering free article syndication, they'll
grab an article just cause they want five hundred words about a topic and they'll just
throw that up on their site and if you have enough of that or even an entire site being
nothing but these thin, low quality, article bank sort of sites, then your site, as a whole,
is often the sort of thing that users don't want to land on.
So that would be what we'd call thin syndication.
You can also pull stuff in from RSS, you could be scraping a site, if you're building the
mash up, you wanna ask yourself, "What is the value?
Am I just pulling things in from a single affiliate feed or am I pulling things from
a bunch of different places?"
If there's no original content that you've written then why should someone be landing
on your site?
Even if you think you're adding value by including, you know, a paragraph from Wikipedia and then
the rest of your page is pretty cookie cutter, it's a good idea to ask other people, not
just, sometimes you get a little too close to your site and if you ask other people they
can tell you, "Well, I'm not sure how this is different from the other 5,000 sites that
I get if I search for that exact same phrase that might be in your affiliate feed."
So typically, you know, if it's a doorway page action then it might apply on just the
directory that would affect, that would have the doorway pages, but it can apply to the
entire site.
In fact, that's relatively common.
If your entire site is nothing but relatively cookie cutter stuff, affiliate feeds, low
quality content, content you didn't write yourself and, of course, it can apply to sub
parts as well.
If you're a lawyer and you have part of a directory that's on your site that's nothing
but low quality marketing articles that you just pulled down and you're just pasting so
it's like a keyword net to try to attract users, then we might take action on just that
directory.
So, okay, so that's a lot of information to kind of explain the context on thin content
with little or no added value.
So, what can you do?
Well, certainly you can remove the content that you didn't write yourself or that is
thin or doesn't add much value.
You can also try to think about what additional value can I add?
You know, is there unique content that I can add?
And when I say unique I don't just mean I take an article and I spin it so that it's
unique, I mean something that you wrote because you have experience, you've used the product,
you know whether it's really good or not.
You can also think about actual reviews whether it's user generated reviews, reviews by you,
talking about the functionality of products, you can make videos, it goes back to the sort
of thing where we're looking for original content, original research, original insight,
something that would make the site compelling, something that would make it so that users
really like the site, they'd bookmark it, they'd tell their friends about it, they'd
come back to it, they really enjoy the site and, so, if you're just making a fly by night
site that just pulls together a bunch of different feeds, that's probably something that people
are less excited to land on.
So the question I would ask yourself, if you get this message, is "Okay, do I have the
option where I can remove some of the content that maybe isn't original?
Or maybe I can come up with some unique angle, some take that would really add more value,
that would make users excited to land on that page."
Anyway, that's just a very brief overview but hopefully with a little bit of stepping
outside the shoes of the webmaster and trying to look at it from the perspective of the
searcher, or regular user, you can get an idea of why we might think doorway pages,
thin affiliates, pages that are just pulled together from RSS or low quality articles
are not something that our users really wanna see, they complain about, they get angry about,
they do spam reports about them so that's the sort of thing where it's on a spectrum
of value add and if you get low enough then we consider that to have violated our web
spam guidelines.
We'll send you that message and then you can think about, "Okay, what do I need to do move
up that value add to where I'm really doing something that users will find compelling?"
Hope that helps.