October 26

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Be Careful with pages that have thin content, they can be de-indexed

By Jason Khoo

October 26, 2020


Transcript

Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. 

Today's conversation, "Be careful with pages within content, they can be de-indexed." Now, this is an important conversation because sometimes when you have pages on your site, it just might naturally be a page with a little content, and if you're not always monitoring it, it actually might get de-indexed. So we're going to talk about that today, but before we begin, I do want to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a tea, it's a green tea, and actually it's not from Teavana, I just use the container.

A lot of times on this channel, the container has nothing to do with the actual tea, we just reuse a lot of tea containers. But this is a green tea that was gifted to my father, who then was gifted to me. My dad decided to go back to China and then go reconnect with our essential clan, just to go find our ancestral grounds and everything. And so the family that he met up with, which was our long lost family, gifted him this tea. So it's a kind of a special guest today, but let's go ahead and get brewing, get chatting.

So when you have a page with little content, it can be de-indexed. And the reason why is when Google is crawling your site, if they're reading pages that they feel have very little to none value to their search engine, where if that page, because it has so little content or nothing of real value on it, they will not... They'll label it as there's no value, so they'll de-index it. They'll take it off their search library. And so where this is kind of important is there are occasions where seemingly your page may have little content, but graphically or with videos, it might actually have a lot.

So let me give you a great example. We ran a campaign for a client where they were offering free videos for people who were having a hard time during the pandemic. And so the page that we created was just an application page with some short instructions and then examples of videos that we had created for others, and so the page actually became a pretty powerful SEO page in the sense that we were driving a lot of links to that page. Now, the reason why we were driving so many links was because so many people were interested in the videos. They were like, "Hey, this company is offering free videos." So the page itself became very powerful for us where actually, it was like the third or fourth most powerful page on our site.

Now, the other day... And this was live, I actually just caught this the other day. I went to go check on Google search and search console, and I figured out the page was de-indexed. And the reason why, I'm pretty much assuming, is because if I looked at the page, there is almost no content, but it is because it's a page that has an application and also a video. But the problem is the application I believe is an iFrame, so it's an embed code. In addition, the videos are embed codes so it's a page that almost looks blank to Google. So actually, the problem here is because the page was de-indexed we're not going to get all the value of all those links coming into our website. We need this page to be indexed so that Google understands the page, and they take into account all the links and SEO value that goes into that page.

So that is a perfect example of a page where, when you're reading an article and it's little or thin content, and you're like, "Oh yeah, it's probably because they're doing something to spammy." This was something where it was an actual... We were not doing anything spammy or anything against the rules, we were just creating a page that visually it looks great, but we didn't realize content-wise, texture-wise, it wasn't that laden out with content. So naturally that can have big implications because sometimes one of the pages that you really work on may have little content because as a design it looks great, before text on the page is very minimal.

So in that case, what I just want you guys to be aware of is if you see on search console that a page might be de-indexed, sometimes it's because of the content reason. So therefore, if it does happen, for example this page, we're going to add more content, kind of find ways to say, "Okay, these were the videos that were created. Here's some good examples. Here's some testimonials of the videos we've created, and please let us know if you have any other questions." That would help us when we're going to resubmit it and then get it re-indexed so that it can actually live on Google, but also be able to pass the link of value that we acquired during that campaign.

So I'm going to keep that video pretty short. It's a pretty specific situation in SEO, but it can have big implications, especially in the case where I just discussed, you have a high value page, it just somehow gets de-indexed. So if you have any questions about that, please let me know. But if you guys found the video valuable, please "like" and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon.

Thanks everybody.

Jason Khoo

About the author

Jason is founder and CEO of Zupo, which is an Orange County based SEO consulting agency helping construct powerful long term SEO strategies for our clients. Jason also enjoys multiple cups of tea a day, hiding away on weekends catching up on reading and rewatching The Simpsons for the 20th time.

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