Hi everybody.

If you've gotten a message about thin content with little or no added value, I wanted to take a few minutes to explain what that means, give you some context and help you understand what to do if you get that message in our our free webmasterconsole. So hopefully the phrase thin content with little or no added value is relatively intuitive.

But let's walk through some examples of the sorts of things that we would consider to fall into that category.

A simple example would be doorways.

So this can vary everywhere from the classic doorway page, where somebody is just making a ton of different pages, each one for a very slightly different phrase or a different keyword,

and you land on the page and it says, Click here to enterin a big button or something like that.

But you can also have more subtle doorway pages.

So we ran into a direct TV installer in Denver, for example, and that installer would say, Well, I install for every city in Colorado, and so I'm going to make a page for every single city in Colorado.

And if it's Boulder or if it's Aspen or whatever, I do DirecTV installs and all those.

And if you just were to land on that page, it might look relatively reasonable.

But if you were to look at four or five of those pages, you'd quickly see that the only difference between them was the city, and that's something that we would consider a doorway as well and not as useful.

So doorways are definitely one type of thin content, another one that we often see and is relatively common.

Maybe the most common by volume is thin affiliates.

So an affiliate program is when on your website, you refer someone to go purchase product, usually somewhere else, and then you get a certain amount of that money back.

So it might be 5% of all purchases that somebody makes if they go off to another shopping site. For example.

Now, affiliates can absolutely add value if you're reviewing textbooks and you had six books this last semester and you talked about the pros and cons of this one.

Linear algebra is good on this one, but I didn't like introduction to algorithms, and then you have an affiliate link to Amazon.

That's still something where you're adding value.

People are really reading a hard one bit of wisdom that you have learned from that textbook and that you have written in your review.

A thin affiliate is something a little bit different.

It typically is when someone is just grabbing an affiliate feed. And so these are an affiliate feed is when you have descriptions of different products that the merchant makes available, and someone just grabbed that and they just throw it up on the website.

They don't change the copy, they don't add any original insight or research or analysis or reviews or videos or any of the things that we would consider to be adding value.

So if you have a finite affiliate site, oftentimes you're competing with a ton of other sites, which are cookie cutter sites. And a good question to ask yourself is if I land on this page, my page, what's the added value of that versus landing on someone else's affiliate page or even landing directly on the merchant and being able to purchase directly.

So thin affiliates are relatively common thing because affiliate fees are very easy to grab.

And if you can get traffic and just send people, then you can make a certain amount of money.

Another very common thing that will receive.

This is sort of what we call thin syndication.

So syndication is when you are pulling in content from other places, and it as well can be totally fine.

But you'll often see people who just go to a low quality article bank or article marketing site or something that'sjust offering free article syndication.

They'll grab an article just because they want 500 words about a topic, and they'll just throw that up on their site.

And if you have enough of that or even the entire site being nothing but these thin, low quality article bank sort of sites, then your site as a whole is often the sort of thing that users don't want to land on.

And so that would be what we'd call fence indication.

You can also pull stuff in from RSS.

You could be scraping a site.

If you're building a mash up, you want to ask yourself, what is the value?

Am I just pulling things from a single affiliate feed, or am I pulling things from a bunch of different places?

If there's no original content that you've written, thenwhy should someone be landing on your site?

Even if you think you're adding value by including a paragraphfrom Wikipedia, and then the rest of your page is pretty cookie cutter.

It's a good idea to ask other people, not just sometimes you get a little too close to your site, and if you ask othepeople, they can tell you, well, I'm not sure how this is different from the other 5000 sites that I get.

If I search for that exact same phrase that might be in your affiliate feed.

So typically, if it's a doorway page action, then it might apply on just the directory that would have the doorway pages, but it can apply to the entire site.

In fact, that's relatively common.

If your entire site is nothing but relatively cookie cutter stuff, affiliate feeds low quality content content.

You didn't write yourself, and of course it can apply to some parts as well.

If you're a lawyer and you have a part of the directory onyour site, it's nothing but low quality article marketing articles that you just pulled down and you're just pasting so that it's like a keyword net to try to attract users, then we might take action on just that directory.

Okay, so that's a lot of information to kind of explain the context on thin content with little or no added value.

So what can you do?

Well, certainly you can remove the content that you didn't write yourself or that is then.

Or that doesn't add much value.

You can also try to think about what additional value can

I add is their unique content that I can add.

And when I say unique, I don't just mean I take an article and I spin it so that it's unique.

I mean, something that you wrote because you have experience, you use the product, you know, whether it's really good or not.

You can also think about actual reviews, whether it's user generated reviews, reviews by you talking about the functionality of products you can make videos.

It goes back to the sort of thing where we're looking for original content, original research, original insight, somethingthat would make the site compelling, something that would make it so that users would really like the site, they bookmark it, they tell their friends about it, they'd come back to it, they really enjoy the site.

And so if you are just making a fly by night site that just pulls together a bunch of different feeds, that's probably something that people are less excited to land on.

And so the question I would ask yourself if you get this message is okay.

Do I have the option where I can remove some of the content that maybe isn't original?

Or maybe I can come up with some unique angle, some take that would really add more value.

That would make users excited to land on that page anyway, that's just a very brief overview.

But hopefully with a little bit of stepping outside the shoes of the webmaster and trying to look at it from the perspective of a searcher or a regular user, you can get an idea of why we might think doorway pages then affiliates, pages that are just pulled together from RSS or low quality articles are not something that our users really want to see.

They complain about.

They get angry about they do spam reports about them.

And so that's the sort of thing where it's on a spectrumof value add.

And if you get lost low enough, then we consider that to have violated our web spam guidelines.

We'll send you that message and then you can think about

OK. What do I need to do to move up that value add where

I'm really doing something that users will find compelling hope that helps.