The advent of Google Panda has signalled the beginning of the search engine giant’s war against low-quality content. By now, lots of webmasters have already suffered dramatic plunges in their traffic and visibility in the search engines, and it’s not going to get any better as long as their has nothing more than thin content. And if you have received a warning about thin content with little or no added value in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you best heed that warning and try to add value to your site if you want success in Google search results.

What constitutes thin content

So what exactly is thin content? As far as Google is concerned, any content in your website that you did not create yourself—therefore non-original—is thin content. This covers product descriptions from manufacturer’s websites or any content you have taken from all over the Internet. Thin content may also refer to an empty page that literally has little content on it.

If you’re one of those people who are facing thin content problems facing, Google’s Head of Spam Search Matt Cutts shares some tips on how to add value to your site in a YouTube video.

In the video, Cutts makes special mention of affiliate sites and article syndication as most vulnerable to a thin content warning. He says that while an affiliate site isn’t really bad per se, it has to add some value, especially when its content is just basically identical to other websites out there. As for article syndication, webmasters don’t really add any value to their site at all, no matter how many articles they grab from Wikipedia, RSS feeds and free article banks. They are still, after all, non-original content, and therefore thin content.

Post more original and unique content

If you have received a thin content warning, the best thing you can do, according to Cutts, is to remove those thin content pages that do not in any way add value to your site and, better yet, add original and unique content to the site. By original and unique content, he means original articles, videos, infographics, audio or anything that makes the site more interesting. The more interesting the original and unique content, the more it would add value to your site.

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

Watch the video and hear it from the man himself.