What is Thin Content?

Simply put it is poor content, low quality content, few words of content which is classified as ‘low quality’ by search engines and fails to generate any significant search engine traffic. So basically it adds to the site bloat and reduces your link equity value. Note that low pageviews does not necessarily mean thin content, its possible the content is good, but not highly searched.

If you autogenerate or scrape content, it can lead to thousands of low quality web pages which get no traffic, so this thin content is what needs to be fixed or moved to different domain / subdomain to fix Google Panda penalty (e.g. we moved our job board to a different domain, as it synced data from a huge dataset).

How to Find  Thin Content?

Since our site was recently stuck by Google Panda update, we have witnessed very low traffic since then. This update especially affected sites with heavy ads above the fold, but then there are several reason Panda can strike. As we looked into the site archives, there indeed was lot of thin content which had accumulated over the years since 2004, when the site started.

So lets get started… Open up your Google Analytics statistics (Google Analytics is a must have site traffic tracking tool, and its free!). Go to Content > Site Content > Content Drilldown. Then choose to review traffic details of the last one year.

We use archives based on months in a path like /archives/year/month/,  we simply browse down to  Content Drilldown > Archives > Year > Month.

Now you can analyze in detail which articles are getting low traffic. Remember to sort by pageviews to get the data.

We tend to delete or unpublish all articles which have less than 10 pageviews in a year!

Depending on your site, you can instead choose 3-6 month data and decide on lower criteria like 5 pageviews. Either way you need to relook at all these pages and analyze why these pages are getting low traffic, fix the content, or move to drafts to fix later, or simply delete them. Since these articles never received any traffic over the year, removing them would not make a traffic drop anyway.

Remove Thin Content

Most articles affected with low traffic on our site were having large blockquoted text. The blogging styles were different in 2004-2007, and there was a tendency to repeatedly quote text from authoritative resources. After a threshold, this might have been viewed as copied / duplicate content from another site (especially since blockquotes are also linked back to the source).

Another important group was articles with broken links. Well WordPress has an excellent plugin to find broken links and nofollow them all in minutes! We are still working on removing broken links from our old archive pages, as over 10% links were broken!

We reviewed lots of old content month by month and  identified lots of low traffic content, removed quoted content, fixed articles which were useful, and yet deleted over 500 articles over the last week! … and plan to remove at least 200  more this week!

Warning: Remove content only if you clearly understand what you are doing. It might be a better idea to unpublish rather than delete posts, in case you need to restore content later. Many of these articles may have backlinks and may have had traffic further in the past, so if you created the content, you know what your past popular content was like nobody else. It is a good idea to edit / delete the content yourself, rather than outsourcing it to an intern.

Note: Low pageviews does not necessarily mean thin content, its possible the content is good, but not highly searched, and removing them can harm your site. So it is essential to check your content, identify why its ranking poorly, and if it is actually good original content, but with low searched terms and therefore low pageviews … keep it.  (Thanks @Sumesh)

It is essential for webmasters to find thin content today to fix Panda updates, or even better to prevent your site from getting penalized. Subscribe our blog as we continue to fight Google Panda and post tips that helped us.

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There a dozens of ways to get traffic to your site. Some of the methods include Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, guest blogging, and solo ads, just to name a few. While paying for visitors can bring immediate rewards, it’s also possible to lose a ton of money while you’re learning the ropes. And when you’re just starting out, cash to invest in your online business might be in short supply.

One of my favorite traffic generation methods involves spending no money whatsoever. All it takes is a little sweat equity, and this is one of the best investments you can make in your business. I’m talking about Forum Marketing. I know, not glamorous and sexy, right? Well, keep reading to find out how to leverage the problems people are seeking answers to by hanging around forums in your niche.

Find The Right Target Audience

This is actually pretty easy using our old friend Google. Simply enter your niche and the word forums and you’ll turn up pages of potential marketing opportunities. Add a few keywords to narrow down your search and you can focus your efforts even further.

For instance, I entered “Tropical Fish Forums” to turn up dozens of potential places where I could check out what fishy people are talking about. But to narrow it a bit further I tried “Tropical Fish Beginner Forums” and found a whole different subset of forums that focus in on those who are just beginning to care for tropical fish. Those that may be seeking advice on how to get started, like the best size tank for their place, or the most economical filter, etc. Someone who may be looking to spend money on their new hobby. If that’s not an AH-HA moment, I don’t know what is!!

Getting Your Forum Feet Wet

It’s pretty easy to do this part. To get started you’ll just need to read through some of the forum posts to get idea of what kind of community you’re getting involved in. Spend some time and really read what people have written. This is the part where the sweat equity comes in. And to increase your chances of getting the free traffic flowing, you’ll need to be doing this same thing for perhaps 5 to 10 forums. So initially there’s a fair bit of “work” involved, but the rewards are so worth it.

Once you have a sense of the community it’s time to start contributing to the conversations taking place. You may actually have to sign up to be a member, so keep track of your username and password in a text file on your computer to prevent confusion and wasting time later on. Then pick some threads that appeal to you and offer opinions and advice. The idea here is to be super friendly and helpful without being pushy or pitching any products. Sales pitches will definitely get you banned from almost any forum. You need to establish yourself as a helpful voice and active member. Soon people will begin to recognize your username and rely on you to provide answers to their questions. This will help position you as an expert in the field.

The forum is a place where people come to converse with liked-minded folks and to find answers to their questions. You should be respectful at all times and avoid injecting your personal opinions on subjects other than what’s covered in the thread or forum you’re on. Absolutely no inflammatory posts should be made. Treat this as a great opportunity to get your name out there as an expert in your field, because word travels fast in these forums, and bad behavior will not be tolerated. On the other hand, if you prove yourself to be helpful and respectful, that news too will certainly get around.

Your Key To Success, Your Forum Signature

Blatant self-promotion is simply not allowed in any forum, period. So how in the world do you get people to visit your website or blog so you really show them what you can offer?

When you sign up for membership at the forum, you’ll probably be given the opportunity to create a profile telling other forum members a little about yourself. In this profile is where you have the chance to point people to your online real estate if they want to find out more about you.

If you do things right, people will begin to trust you and naturally want to find out more information about you. Your profile is your chance to gently point them in the right direction. Again, don’t be pushy. It’s a real turn off, and believe me, the word will get out.

Some forums allow a signature box, and you should be able to mention your website or blog here as well. Just remember to be subtle and you should be fine. People hate being sold to.

I’d like to mention just a few more important points about forum marketing:

• When seeking out forums, make sure the ones you’re considering are active and thriving. Too many forums have been abandoned or only have sporadic use, so be sure to check to see there are current posts and active users before you waste your time.
• Most forums have a FAQ section, and you may be able to get some useful information there.
• Look for LONG threads, the ones with many posts and active participation. These have many eyeballs viewing them every day.

Forum marketing can be a very lucrative source of free traffic. The visitors you get will be laser-focused. They will already know and are visiting your site because of the reputation you’ve built offering valuable and free information in the forums. This is the best kind of traffic you could ever ask for.

Guest Author Ted Begnoche is a writer, internet marketer, and owner of NetProfitPersuasion. His passion for generating traffic sometimes keeps him from sleeping at night.

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I have been using the amazing Broken Links Checker plugin for quite some time since Panda updates became famous and it has helped us find and fix all broken links on our website.

Check Broken Links

Few months back, the first time we used the plugin it took several hours as it scanned across our entire site and you could continue to refresh and see how many links were broken and how many were redirects. Since over last 7 years, this was the first time we checked broken links in such a comprehensive way, nearly 10% of outbound links were broken!

This was a huge exercise to fix all links in thousands of posts, but the interface integrates very well in the WordPress admin and easily allows you to Edit url, unlink text or mark the url not broken.

There are many options about to optimize as per your schedule, with many other custom options. But as I continued to fix these urls, I realized it would take many weeks to fix up the entire site. The plugin meanwhile also offered a quick and powerful way to nofollow all such links and even add a CSS strikethrough on all broken links so visitors would not click through these broken 404 links.

This is a highly recommended plugin for all WordPress bloggers. Broken links are very bad for SEO and this is a very powerful tool to fix all broken urls in few clicks. Try it out and tell us how many broken urls did you find on your WordPress blog?

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Google Page Layout Update

We had only one 336×280 ad unit aligned right and only one 160x90px adlink unit aligned left above the main content. There are few 125×125 buysellads banners in the sidebar. Ironically the same day Google Adsense sent an email that we should place upto 3 Adsense ad units to monetize more. High ad to content sites were earlier penalized by the Google Panda update and reducing ads was a suggested measure for Panda recovery.

What seemed to be the problem was the 2 navigation bars on top pushing content lower and there were ads placed high. So it seemed likely that there was low content to ad ratio above the fold. Now the site traffic is down badly by 50%.

Page Layout Changes

Some changes I quickly did to fix the site layout were as follows-

1. Navigation bars were removed from all pages (except the homepage), as this will help to push the content upwards and expose more content above the fold
2. The content area width was widened to allow more content to rise above the fold.
3. Breadcrumbs were made smaller and their high navigation was significantly narrowed
4. Reduced the size of the large rectangle from 336x280px to 300x250px and continued to retain it right aligned. That still retains the single Adsense unit.
5. Removed the 160px wide ad link unit, so that removes the sole ad link unit.
6. Pushed down the Buysellads in the sidebar, from the middle right position to a much lower position. This brings it below the fold mostly and now we need to reduce the ad pricing significantly. We also plan to reduce the number of 125×125 ads from max 4 to 2 in number soon.
7. Used the browser size tool to ensure there was only 1 ad visibile on majority of our pages for maximum users
8. We also removed the excellent related posts widget by Outbrain, the amazing Sharebar plugin, several other sidebar plugins and scripts to reduce confusion with ad scripts, which in turn made site faster and reduced page load time significantly
9. Removed repeated several links for popular posts etc, which might be interpreted wrongly as duplicate content.

Site Traffic Recovery?

Now as mentioned in the Google article, sites affected by page layout algo will be fixed when Googlebot recrawls affected sites, which should restore the search engine rankings, and it might take weeks. But reports are coming in that this was the Google Panda 3.2 update, which might suggest need to fix some other issues and may complicate traffic recovery.

The good part about the strong QOT community is that despite the search engine traffic drop, we will continue to publish great content and every new QOT article will continue to reach 25000 RSS readers, 8700 Facebook fans, 3900 Twitter fans and 1900 Google+ followers.

It has been a learning experience and indeed the site loads much faster, has much lesser ads, much cleaner design and definitely a better user experience… which Google aims for. Please see if any of these issues affect your site and fix them as soon as possible.

Any advice from the readers which might help site traffic recover is most welcome.

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Page Layout Google Update

The earlier Google Panda update was said to significantly affect Google search engine rankings for websites with high ad to content ratio. This saw many webmasters reduce the  number of ads, remove low quality thin content and generate a high content-ad ratio. What this new Google update does is target sites where large ads dominate above the fold area, which has high visibility, needs no scrolling  and therefore has a high click rate for ads.

This leads to poor user experience, since users are hit with so many ads, and cannot find the content, which is pushed down by the ads. Current Google updates aim to reduce the ads above the fold so that users clicking through search results get exposed to … in Google’s own words “ lot of visible content above-the-fold “ and not just ads.

Since ads above the fold get higher CTR, webmasters do prefer to place ads there, and Google will not affect such sites. Only when the ads are excessive and the content is difficult to find, such sites will be affected.

Is Your Site Ad-Heavy

Google suggests you use Browser Size tool or many other tools to test your website in different screen resolutions and see how your site space is used and how ads dominate your site. I used the browser site tool and it looks like this

Interpretation – 90% contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger. If your site is center aligned, its a good idea to resize the browser window to test the tool or you will get a wrong result. One more thing to note is that these are client area sizes, not browser window sizes (so they are without the title bar, toolbars, status bars), which means the screen area visible will actually be smaller.

Test the tool with your site and you will realize that ads actually do occupy a large screen space which is all that is seen by a large percentage of people browsing with low screen resolutions

Is your site traffic down?

Its time to relook you ads placement and remove large ad blocks that over power your prime screen area. If your site traffic is indeed hit badly, do the site design changes and wait for Googlebot to recrawl and restore your traffic, which could take weeks… Google is watching … dont let your site get penalized.

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Google Search has revealed that this new update brings in a new classifier which will affect parked domain traffic.

New “parked domain” classifier: This is a new algorithm for automatically detecting parked domains. Parked domains are placeholder sites that are seldom useful and often filled with ads. They typically don’t have valuable content for our users, so in most cases we prefer not to show them.

A parked domain name displays a temporary web page when people type your domain name in a web browser. People usually park domain names till they decide to create a website, find a hosting provider, or simply to hold and sell domain names later. Till then most decide to make money online with the page, which might draw some Google traffic at least.

If you look around at parked domain names, typically they are keyword rich for targeting specific traffic and have no useful content. Moreover, while the domain is parked, domain owners decide to install advertising programs, which also brings in advertising revenue on the side. Since the parked domain page is full of ads only, there is a high chance the visitor who reaches such a page will click through and make money for the domain owner.

Many domain name registrars offer domain parking monetization services. GoDaddy Cash Parking is a service from Godaddy domain registrar, which displays ads on parked domains and domain owners can earn 60-80% of the ad revenue. They charge $4-$5 per month for the basic plan service. Google Adsense for Domains is another free popular program by Google, where domain owners can display Adsense ads on their parked domain names to earn free money.

Now Google is set to change all that … and parked domain names will get much lower search engine traffic it seems. This will seriously affect all domain parking income for people who target this monetization strategy.  What are your thoughts?

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Depending on the industry it’s generally the case that the competition is relatively low, meaning that with some time and patience you can vastly improve your online visibility.

Local Domination

Let’s start by doing a search on Google for something we know there are lots of – “Jewellers in London”. You can see from the screenshot below that the anatomy of the SERP (search engine result page) is vastly different to a standard search.

We have a huge section at the top dedicated to Google Places which shows the exact location of the businesses that Google deems to be most important for our chosen search phrase. On the right hand side there is a map which includes markers and a click through, while at the top and below the map we see paid ads which include contact information.

The emphasis given to these businesses is huge, but how do they get there? The answer is a mix of local citations (which we will come to later), making sure that their site is optimised in a way that lends itself to local search, and a Google Places listing, which is where we’re going to start.

This part is actually the easiest; all you need to do is go to the Google Places for Business page and create an account. You’ll need to enter details about your business – including the name, address and telephone number – and then wait for a verification letter to arrive in the post. Follow the steps it contains and you’re done.

There is one important thing to note here: your business details. From now on you need to use them in exactly the same way everywhere you reference your business online. If you put a gap between the area code and main part of your telephone number, do the same next time.

Every tiny details needs to be exactly the same to give you the best chance of achieving those top rankings. A great way to do this is to use a service like Evernote and create a note with your business details in it – that way you can just copy and paste, no matter which device you’re using at the time.

On Page Changes

Now, while you’re waiting for the verification letter to arrive let’s sort out your site. I’m going to limit this to three simple tweaks so as to minimise the impact and time needed to make the changes. If you can’t do any of this yourself, get your web designer to help. If that’s not possible, a freelance service like oDesk will help you find someone with the skills needed to help you out. This is what you need to do:

1. On your homepage change your title tag to ‘Business Type in Location | Your Business Name’. An example of this for a jewellers would be ‘Jewellers in London | CS Bedford’.
2. In the footer of your site include your business details (copy and paste!) inside an address tag. This could look something like Business Name, Business Address, Business Postcode
3. Finally, make sure that the text of your homepage uses your business name a couple of times, and also mentions that business type from the title tag 2 or 3 times. Make sure that this is natural and makes sense to someone reading your page – the last thing you want to do is confuse your visitors.

An optional extra is that once your Google Places listing has been confirmed you can add a snippet of the map to your contact / find us page. This not only makes it easier for potential customers to see where you’re based but also gives an extra indicator to the search engines that you are who you say you are. I haven’t seen any proof that this makes a difference to rankings but it certainly won’t do you any harm!

Local Citations

All we’re really talking about here is links to your site. Each link, as long as it’s from what Google would see as a reliable source, is like a vote and as a general rule the more votes you have, the higher the page your likely to rank.

For this example we’re going to concentrate on getting links from local directories – places that allow you to list your business with all of your contact information. Sense of these are free, while others charge. Expensive doesn’t always mean better, so I would personally start with the cheaper options and work your way up to the more expensive ones depending on your budget.

Remember to add your details in exactly the same format as your Google Places listing, and be sure to keep an eye out for any verification emails and phone calls. This is a fairly mundane task so doing a little bit here and there is the way to go, and helps to make sure that you don’t appear to be spamming when all of a sudden you start getting lots and lots of links from different sites.

Pro Tip: A great resource to help find local citation sources is Whitespark. Seriously, give it a go – you won’t be disappointed (and in case you’re wondering, I’m not affiliated with these guys in any way, shape or form).

And finally…
Remember to be patient. The changes you make here aren’t going to give you an instant life-changing event. If you do things properly your rankings should increase gradually, but it does all depending on what your competitors are up to. If you’re unsure of the best steps forward, ask someone – there are plenty of SEOs around who’d be more than happy to help… Just do a search for SEO in ‘Your Town’!

Guest author Matt Beswick is an SEO and Web Consultant based in the UK. As a self-confessed web geek he specialises in link building and outreach.

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Google Panda Updates first came in month of Feb 2011 which affected many top sites like hubpages, squidoo, daniweb etc. Many small publishers who are not concentrating on quality content got affected by this algorithm whose main aim was to reduce the ranking of low quality sites. My site also got affected with this update and I learnt some tips from my mistakes which I would like to share and hope it will also help you if your blog is hit by this new panda update.

Note : If you really want to improve your site then it will take considerable time and efforts.

Google Panda Update Recovery

1. Know your site – Make complete list of your site or blog URLs and analyze the content of each URL carefully. Note the URLs in an excel sheet which needs improvement like those which have very less content, lots of spelling mistakes and copied content.

2. Check Page ranking – Note the pages/posts which were at good rank at Google search results before the Panda update and now they have low rankings. Improve the quality of content of these pages, share them on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and submit them to social voting sites like Digg, Mixx with unique headlines.

3. Improve the internal linking of pages – Google loves internal linking as much as external links, so keep that in mind when you write new posts- interlink these with old posts with relevant keywords.

4. Clean your site : It can be done by removing posts/pages which are irrelevant to your site or not adding any significant value to your site.

5. Use more Google services – Use Blogspot, Youtube and Google plus wherever you can, because you will find that Google is giving preference to their sites or content as compared to other sites. e.g YouTube.com and Android.com were among the top winners of increase in traffic from the Panda update. And always update yourself with new additions or improvements in their search algorithm at the Google’s webmaster blog.

6. Gain authenticity - If your site has very less page rank then get some good backlinks by submitting on high PR sites (quality) which accept guest posts.

7. Too many ads – may be causing problem for the viewers and interfering with the reader expererience while on your site, so keep control on ads and also select the appropriate location for them.

8. Lessons from past – Curious case of Daniweb & Hubpages : Daniweb.com a IT discussion forum is affected two times by Google Panda update, first in Feb 2011 and 2nd this time, but both time daniweb recovers from this update. How they do it? First time they recover by changing the entire site’s URL structure. The actual URL of every single page has changed. Watch more on below video

DaniWeb Speaks out on Recovering from Google Panda

Hubpages recovered by implementing subdomains across the site but google clearly states that “Subdomains can be useful to separate out content that is completely different from the rest of a site — for example, on domains such as wordpress.com. However, site owners should not expect that simply adding a new subdomain on a site will trigger a boost in ranking.”

9. Listen to Google – Google’s Amit Singhal said, “Any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent…That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is.”

He adds more “Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.”

10. Concentrate on your blog niche – and become master in that niche (do not divert from your site niche) .

Super Tip —> “Write original well explained articles which people love to link bait naturally like Wikipedia”

This is a guest post by Arun Garg from Arunii who loves to write about SEO, blogging, and gadgets. You can also guestblog here.

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There are tons of articles on the internet talking about the importance of quality backlinks. So, I’m going to assume you know the basics.

To start off, there are basically two methods of building links: The traditional way and the non-traditional way. My strategy falls somewhere in between. There are few tricks that have worked from me – and I am sure they would work for you as well.

The Tried and Tested “Lists”

I believe human psychology is tuned to click list based posts. There is something about these articles that makes users to click, share and link to them. These articles are a great way to build traffic, get noticed by other blogs and go viral on social media sites – and if you have a number (like “Top 10…”) in the headline, then your job is half done.

Personally, I do not like list based articles because there is too much of generic content and very little in-depth analysis. But having them once in a while on your blog won’t harm your reputation that much.

But do not overdo it.

List articles stuff too much information to be gulped down in a single read. That is why users save it, share it and above all link to it. One thing that separates a great List based article from a mediocre one is the amount of original content it has. I have seen text directly copied from the resource sites/ pages.

Rather, write your own thoughts and opinions about the product so that the users have a reason to believe what you have to say.

Spark Controversy

Last week I wrote two posts slamming Google+ and its ineffective management. The articles generated quite a lot of interest from people and ended up being linked by other blogs.

So why did I succeed in generating backlinks?

Simple, I challenged the status quo. There was a lot of buzz on the internet about the rise of Google+ and how it had reached 50 million users already.

I could have gone ahead and rehashed the same stuff, but I took a detour and wrote the opposite of what people believed. Well, I did get slammed by ardent Google+ fans, but then, they stood up and took notice of me.

That is how things work in real world and trust me, that is how things work online too.

Write about startups and companies

This strategy was discovered accidently. On my blog, I write a lot about companies and startups and after writing for about couple of months, I noticed that these very companies were linking back to me — and these were no small ones.

Companies like Hootsuite generously linked to my articles that explained about their product. A quick glance at their PageRank will reveal you that they have a healthy PageRank 6! I now have about a dozen top-notched companies linking to my blog and the effect of this strategy: Page Rank jumped from PR0 to a more respectable PR3.

While some might argue PageRank is no longer relevant, but believe me, it feels great to be linked by a reputable source.

These tips are just an addition to the traditional ways of building backlinks. It has been said over and over again that no matter what, quality of articles separates one blog from another. The three tips that I spoke about won’t work for you if you write poorly.

Spend some time, take breaks and write an awesome article that compels users to link to you. Hopefully you’ll find these tips useful. Do comment and let me know if you find these strategies worth trying.

Guest author Shashank Harwalkar is a social media enthusiast who runs the social media news blog Fastgush.com. He covers social networking news, social media marketing and social media startups. If you would like to reach him, send him an email at shashank@fastgush.com. You can also guestblog here. Image by ivanpw under CC license

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Google Panda Update

Till now the following Google Panda updates have gone live.

Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011
Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 week gap)
Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 week gap)
Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
Panda Update 2.3: July 23, 2011 (about 5 week gap)
Panda Update 2.4: August 12, 2011 (about 3 week gap)
Panda Update 2.5: September 28, 2011 (about 7 week gap)

In fact Google changes its algorithm everyday!

Searchmetrics which has become famous for releasing lists of sites with severe traffic loss over the last few Panda updates, has again compiled a list of the latest Google Panda 2.5  updates affected sites. Some of the very popular sites like TheNextWeb, Technorati, PRNewsWire, have been hit.

Not all were losers – there were many gainers too like Youtube, Metacafe, AOL, IGN, Zappos etc. Check your analytics software and see how Google Panda has affected your site.

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