Content is the king and is the most valuable factor in your blog’s SEO performance. The reason for this is that Google (and other search engines) wants to make sure that their visitors get to the information they want with as little effort as possible. To achieve this, it is important that your blog has informative, high quality, and completely relevant content. There are minor ways to make sure that search engines view your website as having these qualities but one of the essential things to do is first remove the low quality content from your blog or from being indexed at least.
The idea of removing thin content is that it will eliminate any low value content from your website. This would be articles that are very low in word count or have no real value to the readers. An example of this would be the hello post found in most blogs. If you are simply saying hello, then it is not adding any value to your blog and removing the post would be justifiable. The keyword-spammed content is also important to remove as search engines do not value high keyword density as well as they did before. In fact, it tends to have negative effects as it looks like un-natural optimization of the content.
Step 1 – Find the Thin Content in Your Blog
You have to first find the thin content to remove from your blog. The previous paragraph should give you a good idea on the content that should be removed. You may be able to think of a few specific posts that would be justified for removal. For instance, you may have let your younger brother publish a few posts a few years ago and you know that these have no real value to your blog. If you can think of something like that, you can look back to the particular content and check to see if it should be removed. Also, any duplicate content should be removed during this process if you have not done so already.
Side note: Copied content is also unappealing and can have serious negative effects on your SEO results. A gray area here is quoted content as it is copied but you make note of it. For SEO purposes, it is recommended that you simply reword the quoted content so that it is not directly copied from your resource or just externally linking for the user to view that particular information.
Step 2 – Make an Argument for the Content
You should not automatically decide to remove content from your blog simply because it is short. If it is poorly written then you have nothing to worry about. However, some short posts may actually have value to your website. What you have to consider is how informative and useful the posts actually are as a single paragraph article may provide the information necessary if the topic does not require more discussion. So, make an argument for any content that you are unsure of whether you should remove and decide whether it has any real value or not. It is even more important to debate this with yourself if you believe a high-traffic page contains thin content.
Side note: the traffic generated by a particular page on your website can be an indicator on its actual value and whether it should be difficult to remove or not. For example, you could easily remove all posts made that have not gained at least 10 unique views within a year of posting as there is no reason to believe that it will further contribute to your website at this point.
Step 3 – Removing the Thin Content from Your Blog
Removing thin content from a blog is not difficult. It simply requires you to delete the post from your blog. You should consider if there are any minor changes that could be made to make the article valuable and prevent it from needing to be removed. If not, then simply delete the post from your blog. There may be a broken URL that has caused the content to lose valuable and re-publishing it may be the route to go in this case. Ultimately, it should be easy to determine whether any perceivably thin content should simply be deleted or if certain changes can be made to justify keeping it for the long run.
Daniel Guidotti is a financial blogger and journalist. He has been featured on many authority websites which include Cap Credit, NY Times, Reuters and more.