What is thin content?

For many years, thin content has been frowned upon by the search engines. If there was not much content, they figured that there was little value to the content for the reader and ranked a site accordingly. It appears that these views are changing as represented by this slide on the left. Content must be useful, it must be informative, add value to the reader and be accurate or of high quality. If a page could meet all of these criteria yet still considered to be thin content should it rank highly? We think it should and would like to provide an example.

Thin Content – Example

Let’s assume you want to find out when daylight savings time changes are to occur in North America. You search for |daylight savings 2017″ and are presented with over 13 million results. We picked the first one which gave us the dates, times, etc. on a very small page in terms of text. No need for 500 words, 1000 words, etc. or a lot of images. All you needed to know is what the date was for the next time change and it answered this question. The page met all of the criteria we mentioned and still had what would be considered thin content. Yet was the first result on the search results pages.

This is an extreme example with one possible result and a very specific result. However, the message is that the page of content does not have to have a lot of text. What it needs to do is answer the searchers question. They may not even stay on the page very long, but they got their answer.

Our web pages are between 300 and 500 words each and try to zero in on one topic to deliver or answer a question that our readers may have. Let us know if we are addressing these questions and if there are others we should tackle.