Thin & Duplicate Content: What You Need To Know

What is thin & duplicate content? Best practice for SEO

Content is much more complex than merely throwing some words on your site pages and hoping for the best.

We’ll explain what the best practice is for SEO when it comes to the red flags of duplicate content as well as thin content.

That way, you can make sure you keep Google happy.

And in return, Google will theoretically reward you in the organic listings.

What is thin content?

It’s when there is either no or very little words on the page, to the extent that Google refers to it as having no ‘value’ for the user.

For example, if an ecommerce site’s category page only has one product as part of it, Google might see that category page as having thin content issues.

What sort of pages would count as ‘thin content’?

•  Autogenerated content – this is when the copy has been created by a program, not a real person, for example, through RSS feeds or your search results. The text might not actually make sense to your user, but it may include keywords.
• Scraped content – this is when bots scrape content from other websites and use it as their own
• Pages that are on a thin affiliate website – this is when Google reckons a website for affiliate links, like paid advertisements, is solely for that purpose but there’s no real user value other than that

How to identify thin content problems

Some SEO auditing tools will flag thin content issues, but if you have a Google Search Console (GSC) account, you can use this.

You may receive warnings from GSC that one of your pages has possible thin content on.

Alternatively, you can log in and scan your page’s URL to check for issues.

You need to access the ‘Security and Manual Actions’ section in GSC which you’ll find in the left hand pane, like this.

Top Tip!

Don’t be fooled to think that thin content is all about the length of the copy.

It’s about the page’s relevance and importance for the user.

That means a page with 3000 words of poorly written waffle would actually be less valuable than 250 words of concise, highly relevant copy that’s targeted to the user and optimised well.

Why is thin content bad for SEO?

Google doesn’t like thin content because it suggests that the page doesn’t give the user any value.

It’s not relevant or engaging, so the search engine sees it as a problem. If you’ve received a GSC warning for it, you need to review the pages in question and fix the content.

How to fix thin content issues

1. Use a directive

If you’ve got two or more pages with very similar or identical content on pages ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’, it might be that you’d actually prefer ‘A’ to be the page that ranks in the search listings.

If so, you need to add a canonical tag to ‘B’ and ‘C’ that points to ‘A’.

This acts as a strong hint to Google that you acknowledge the pages are similar, and that you have a preference on which page you want to rank.

2. Make the content greatly valuable

If there is real potential for your page to provide useful and relevant information for your user, expand the content on it and optimise it for the right keywords.

Is there exclusive new research you can add, or a better way of displaying your content?

A thin content opportunity might be a chance to revamp poor content and turn it into a valuable page that is worth shares and organic traffic.

Top tip! It could even be worth doing a spot of research to find out if any of your competitors have a page like the one you want to create. If they do, the step to solving the duplicated content issue is to create your own version of unique content for your website.

You could then take an additional, second step, which would be to trial the skyscraper approach.

What do we mean? If you’ve got a new piece of content that’s got extra user value, check if any of those competitors have any high quality backlinks.

If you contact them politely, let them know you’ve noticed their content, but mention you’ve got an updated version that would be even more helpful for their users, they might give you a backlink.

3. Get rid of it, and redirect it

Is the page serving zero purpose, bringing no traffic and not ranking for any organic keywords? If your answer is yes, it could be worth considering getting rid.

You need to delete the page, but remember to use a 301 redirect on any pages that link to it, so that your users still land on a helpful URL.

Once you’ve fixed the issue, you can resubmit your page on GSC, or wait until GSC checks again.

But those are the basics of dealing with thin content issues.

If you’re worried about any problems like this on your website, our SEO specialists will be able to help.

Let’s move on to the concept of duplicate content.

What is duplicate content in SEO?

Duplicate content is when you’ve got the same copy more than once on your website.

It doesn’t matter if it’s on different pages, such as a blog post, a product page or the home page.

If any of the content is repeated on the same domain, Google classes this as duplicated content.

Is duplicate content bad for SEO?

Yes.

Google will not officially give you a duplicate content penalty. But repeated copy can make life hard for search engines.

• They won’t know which page to keep/remove from their index
• They won’t know if they can trust all of the internal and external linking on each page, and won’t know which page that link juice should go to
• They won’t know which page to rank for organic keywords

If duplicate content causes your page to not be indexed or ranked, you won’t get organic traffic. That means you won’t get organic conversions. So, let’s explain how to spot any duped content so that you can fix it.

How to identify duplicate content

You might not have duplicate content on purpose, but here are some factors that could be causing it to happen. It could be if you’ve got:

• URL variations
• Page versions on both HTTP or HTTPS and www or non www pages
• localised domains

You can check for duplicate content by using Screaming Frog, the crawler tool on Google Search Console or using an SEO auditing tool. Alternatively, you can do a manual Google search by inputting two or three lines into the search engine, and seeing if there is more than one site with your content on.

If there is, it could be worth using one of those tools to find out for definite.

How to fix duplicate content

There are lots of ways to deal with this. First, you need to decide which page you want to rank, from our previous examples of ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’.

Make sure your URL structure is consistent

If you use HTTP and HTTPS, or you switch between www and non www, choose one and stick to it. We’d recommend HTTPS, because that’s the secure version.

So, tell Google your preferred domain, in GSC under ‘Site Settings’.

When you set the preferred domain to ‘A’, which is HTTPS, instead of the unsecure ‘B’, Google knows which one to index and crawl, so you eliminate duplicate content problems.

Plus, if you’ve got any backlinks to ‘B’, Google should actually recognise this, and still retain your link juice to your page ‘A’.

Then, set up 301 redirects from any of your non-preferred pages to go to page ‘A’ to help Google understand which page you want to rank, and so that your user doesn’t hit a broken page.

Set up canonical tags

Do this on your non-preferred pages as a hint to Google as to which page you want to rank. If you’re using a CMS, you should be able to install a plugin to allow you to do this.

Use hreflang to deal with localised URLs

This is an option if, for example, you’ve got content on an English URL, and then translated copy on another URL to serve Spanish readers. In this case, you’d add a hreflang tag to the Spanish site, so Google understands how those two pages relate to each other.

How not to fix duplicated content 

It’s really important that you deal with duplicate copy in the right way. Don’t try and cheat Google by tweaking the content on a page to sound slightly reworded.

Google is likely to work out that it’s ‘unique’ but that it has in fact been re-spun, which could affect your rankings in itself.

Don’t just block your page by sliding in a robots.txt file either in attempt to tell Google not to index it.

It’s far better to add a canonical tag instead, and you may have backlinks pointing to that page, and you don’t want to lose that link juice.

Top tips on creating unique content

So, how do you know you’re producing ‘unique’ content then?

The first place to start is to be aware of the content you’ve already got on your website, and avoid making a very similar version.

But the big lesson here is something we keep coming back to.

Add value for your audience. Come up with fresh topics where there’s highly relevant search volume.

Publish different types of content, like the below.

• Long form, user friendly guides
• Videos & podcasts
• Testimonials
• Data led content like charts & graphs

Theoretically, if your content is valuable and unique, it shouldn’t be duplicated anywhere on your site.

Those are the basics of duplicate and thin content

Are you new to understanding how content works? If you’re not sure what best practice is to implementing it so that it brings you more sales or a new lead, we get it.

Content is king, but it can be confusing at times.

So, hopefully that’s helped give you a basic understanding of the do’s and don’ts of duplicated and thin content.

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