There’s a lot of junk on the net – and we all sample it. I know it, and you know it. We’ve all spent hours watching amusing YouTube videos, checking out friends’ news on Facebook or even (cringe) lost in the maze of evil wonderfulness that is TV Tropes. This may all seem like a lot of junk, but Google doesn’t seem to treat it that way.
This is because, although reading about memes on TV Tropes may seem like a waste of time to someone who should be hard at work, the information contained therein is still valuable. If the Tron nerd viral or the Star Trek Wiki were food, they would probably be something like peanuts. Slightly bad for you, but only in high doses.
What Google hates is the real junk on the internet: thin content. Like the fluffy white bread rolls at a fast food franchise, this content masquerades as consumables but in fact has zero nutritional value. It’s also terrible for your website.
Thin content is the stuff some site owners tried to get away with to stretch their SEO budget. It’s content that contains no new ideas, and only lightly touches on the ideas it does contain. It’s the sort of content that once would have had keywords stuffed in indiscriminately. Site owners have learned that Google hates keyword stuffing, but quite a few haven’t learned about avoiding thin content.
Google hates junk food. Getting your search nutrition facts right is one of the more important SEO jobs.
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