Manual action recovery

Thin Content With Little Or No Added Value - Manual Action Recovery

Google has decided that a large part of your site doesn't give visitors anything they couldn't get elsewhere, so we work out which pages are causing it, fix or remove them and get the manual action reviewed.

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Is this the message in your Search Console?

Google’s Manual Actions report ↗

Search Console / Report example

Manual actions

Thin content with little or no added value

WHAT IS A THIN CONTENT MANUAL ACTION?

A thin content manual action is issued when a reviewer at Google has looked at your site and found low-quality or shallow pages that don't provide substantially unique or valuable content, and Google gives three common examples of what it means by that, i.e. thin affiliate pages, content taken from other sources such as scraped articles or low-quality guest posts, and doorway pages. It has nothing to do with word count, which is where a LOT of people go wrong when they try to fix it themselves, because a 3,000 word page that says the same as fifty other sites is still thin in Google's eyes.

WHAT DOES IT DO TO YOUR SITE?

The action can be applied to a section of the site or to all of it depending on how widespread the reviewer thinks the problem is, and the affected pages are demoted or removed from the results, which for an affiliate site or a site with thousands of location or product pages can mean the pages that were earning all the money are the ones that have gone.

Scope: Affected pages and templates
Typical clean-up time: Estimated after diagnosis
Review time: Several days or weeks

WHY DID GOOGLE ISSUE IT?

Your affiliate pages use the merchant's own product descriptions and images with nothing original added, such as your own testing, comparisons or opinions, so there is no reason for anyone to visit your page and not the merchant's

You have doorway pages, i.e. hundreds of near-identical pages targeting a different town, postcode or keyword variation that all funnel visitors to the same place

Content has been scraped, spun or syndicated from other websites and published with little or no change

Large numbers of pages are auto-generated from templates or feeds with only a product name or a location swapped out between them

The site has accepted years of low-quality guest posts that were written for the link and not for the reader

HOW DO WE FIX IT?

We crawl the site and pull performance data for every indexable URL, then group the pages by template so we can see which page types make up the bulk of the problem
Template inventory
Evidence log · Thin content
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We review each group against Google's policies on thin affiliate pages, scraped content and doorways and put every URL into one of four actions, which are improve, consolidate, noindex or remove
Page-level decisions
Evidence log · Thin content
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write a rebuild specification for the pages worth keeping that sets out what original value has to be added to each page type, and we can produce that content or brief your own team to
Original content evidence
Evidence log · Thin content
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We handle the technical side of the clean-up, i.e. the redirects for consolidated pages, the 410s for removed ones and the changes to templates and internal links so the thin pages don't come back
Live template checks
Evidence log · Thin content
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date
We write the reconsideration request with examples of the bad content removed and the good content added, which is exactly what Google asks for with this manual action
Submission record
Evidence log · Thin content
Affected URL or template
Action taken
Verification date

WHAT GOES INTO THE RECONSIDERATION REQUEST?

The request gives the reviewer the numbers, i.e. how many pages the site had, how many were removed, how many were merged and how many were rewritten, along with a set of example URLs where they can see the improved pages for themselves. Because the reviewer is making a judgement about value and not checking a technical fix, the examples matter more here than with any other manual action and we choose them carefully.

Reconsideration request service →

Questions about recovery

Do I need to delete all my thin pages?

Not necessarily, because some pages are worth improving and some are better merged into a stronger page, however fixing only some of the affected pages won't earn you a partial return, so every page in the affected section needs a decision made about it.

Can I just add more words to each page?

Padding pages out is the most common reason these requests get rejected, because the reviewer is looking for something a visitor can't get elsewhere and more words saying the same thing doesn't give them that.

How long does recovery take?

Your diagnostic will include a clean-up estimate, and Google’s review usually takes several days or weeks, with link reviews sometimes taking longer.

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