Long vs Thin content is one of the hottest topic which is to be discussed as the Real time panda is in the frenzy mood. So before getting started, I have a question for you guys. Do you think content length plays a major role in search engine rankings ? If Yes, you need to think twice, there is one hell of misconception going around this thin vs long content. This article will give you a clear picture about what is a long content and what is a thin content.
It was in the Google Panda update 2.2, Google officially stated that the update was focused on penalizing ‘shallow content’. Henceforth, webmasters seemed to be more concerned about the length of the content than anything else. Shallow content to be referred as ‘thin content’ is a popular misconception.
“Webmasters consider the word ‘thin’ and ‘shallow’ interchangeably”, opined a webmaster in Webmaster World forums.
Long vs Thin vs Shallow Content SERP Influence
Shallowness is more about depth than the size of content. Let me give an example of it, A 1000+ worded article ( which makes no sense ) is more shallower than a 100 words content which is provides the exact thing a person searched more. So what do you think ? Which would google consider over the other ?
Let me make clear of this, I’m not saying thin content (100 words) will always rank over contents with more than 500+ words, after all google is just an algorithm. Google’s algorithm is wired to find keywords in your tags and contents. If you have more words, then you might have more keywords which means you will be ranking for different keywords in search.
I can prove the difference between shallow content and thin content by citing an example. Have a look at Seth Godin’s Typepad blog. I have seen him publishing articles with two or three lines and outranking sites like About.com’s which have well-written articles of thousands of words.
I have personally experimented this in my blogs, and it turns out that articles that performed well in the hands of readers, which are more widely shared in the social media, appears to have an edge over others, no matter what the length of the content is.
Finally, I have an advice for bloggers. It is a habit of most bloggers, with me not being an exception, to bluff about what we are going to write, in the first paragraph of a blog post, just for increasing the word count. You may call it an effective way of stuffing keywords or a working method to increase content length. But it is just useless nonetheless.
I hope you’ll loved reading the article, please do share this with your friends. Never ever mistake shallow and thin content, if you do this mistake you are done with SEO before even starting it. Stay tuned for further updates.
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