In a Google Search Office Hours video, Googler Lizzi Sassman answered a query about skinny content material, clarifying a typical misperception about what skinny content material actually is.
Thin Content
The phrase skinny means missing thickness or width.
So once we hear the time period “skinny content material” it’s not unusual to consider skinny content material as a webpage with not a lot content material on it.
The precise definition of skinny content material is extra alongside the strains of content material that lacks any added worth.
Examples are a cookie cutter web page that hardly differs from different pages, and even a webpage that’s copied from a retailer or producer with nothing further added to it.
Google’s Product Review Update weeds out, amongst different issues, skinny pages consisting of evaluate pages which can be solely product summaries.
The hallmark qualities of skinny pages is that they lack originality, are barely completely different from different pages and/or don’t provide any explicit added worth.
Doorway pages are a type of skinny content material. These are webpages designed to rank for particular key phrases. An instance could be pages created to rank for a key phrase phrase and completely different metropolis names, the place all of the pages are nearly the identical aside from the names of the cities.
Are Short Articles Thin Content?
The particular person asking the query wished to know if splitting up an extended article into shorter articles would end in skinny content material.
This is the query requested:
“Would it’s thought of skinny content material if an article protecting a prolonged subject was damaged down into smaller articles and interlinked?”
Lizzi Sassman answered:
“Well, it’s exhausting to know with out taking a look at that content material.
But phrase depend alone just isn’t indicative of skinny content material.
These are two completely respectable approaches: it may be good to have an intensive article that deeply explores a subject, and it may be equally simply nearly as good to interrupt it up into simpler to grasp matters.
It actually is determined by the subject and the content material on that web page, and your viewers greatest.
So I might deal with what’s most useful to your customers and that you simply’re offering enough worth on every web page for regardless of the subject is likely to be.”
Splitting a Long Article Into Multiple Pages
What the particular person asking the query could have been asking is that if was okay to separate one prolonged subject throughout a number of pages which can be interlinked, which known as pagination.
With pagination, a website customer clicks to the subsequent web page to maintain studying the content material.
The Googler assumed that the particular person asking the query was splitting an extended article into shorter articles dedicated to the a number of matters that the prolonged article coated.
The non-live nature of Google’s new model of web optimization office-hours didn’t permit the Googler to ask a follow-up query to confirm if she was understanding the query accurately.
In any case, pagination is a positive method to break up a prolonged article.
Google Search Central has a web page about pagination best practices.
Citation
Listen to the Google web optimization Office Hours video on the 12:05 minute mark
