Thin content manual action - PBN links or website content?

Hi all,

Sorry to ask about this but like others I received the "thin content with no added value" manual action on my biggest sites. I took it for what Google said in the manual action...that my content was not up to snub. However when I read what others are saying...i'm starting to wonder if it has to do with links instead? My goal was to build the content better onto a new domain (less affiliate links, less telling Google to goto another site, etc) and repoint my PBN links to the new domain.

Is there anyway to check if it is my PBN at all? I'm thinking of adding a PBN site to a new Webmaster Tools but am afraid that'll open stuff up in the case the PBN is still safe. I always thought if it was PBN then the PBN itself would be de-indexed.

Couple of notes:
- None of my PBN sites were de-indexed
- Two sites of mine (which are smaller) and linked in the same PBN are still ranking like they were beforehand. But they didn't rank as well as my bigger sites that were hit

Anyway just wanted to see if there was anyway to check the PBN was not the issue and it was pure content related or not?

Thanks!

Probably not your PBN
In my experience everyone thinks their site is stellar - a work of art, a labour of love. Despite maybe 80% of the sites I review for people being - (frankly). Content thin, plagiarised, un-optimized shit.

I've watched some of the people I've done these reports for in the past go into denial.
"It couldn't possibly be my lovely site" "Gotta be Google and some issue with them discovering links." Hmmmm ok whatever.
Sure some of them have been hit for links, but in the sites I look at only ever come across only one instance of Google reporting thin content when links were an issue, and in that case it was both - so even then the penalty was not incorrect, just missing a second factor.

Scritty

Thanks, I should mention one other thing. One site that was linked within my PBN was not given a manual warning but had the same penalty applied (i.e. one term used to rank #4 and now is #44). Not sure if that means anything to make it look like it is PBN related?

If I were to use my PBN links again, can I simply re-point them from my old money sites to my new money sites, or should I be slowly changing them?

Appreciate all the help.

Adam

Sorry just wanted to bump...anyone else have any ideas about how I can check if this is link related at all?

Thin content penalty is usually just that - content that isn't very informative or useful to the user.

Work on making the content better.


On a side note, there has been a hell of a lot of people getting this same penalty lately. None of my sites have been hit with a penalty - and i don't expect them too, not for thin content anyway.

It's your content, just as they're saying. Don't add your PBN, even one site, to GWT.

i got this penalty as well

I see a lot of penality thread lately. I checked mine and no penality for now. Anyway if something like that happened, can we just modify content and get the site back on track ?

It is not about pbn's or whatsoever link building if you got "thin content" penalty. If you got unnatural links penalty it is about your pbn. And you say your pbn is still indexed. Google usually deindex a pbn site if it discovers it.

Google is cleaning all affiliate sites. It does not matter if you have 100's of high quality content. If 100 amazon aff links are going out from those 100 pages your site get thin content penalty. Don't try to figure out why u got hit.It is not about you. They just do it every year before christmas to get more ad revenue. That is it. If the site is important to you clean the aff links if you can and submit for reconsideration. If not deindex the old site and build another site and move the content there. Don't publish all articles in 1 day though. Try to drip feed them for about 10/day.

Thanks all. So if I decide to re-point my PBN links to the new money sites I assume that it should be slow?

Couple of notes from experience:

-Don't rely on the penalty message in the webmaster tool. They don't tell the truth. People who got penalized because of PBN links also get thin content penalty, as well as people who got penalized because of low content. I have got 3 types of penalties to affiliate sites, some major spam, some thin content, some unnatural links, and all sites were pretty much identical/similar, meaning affiliate sites, with decent content but manipulated links. Google is bothered if they see you as an affiliate site with manipulated links -what penalty you get hit with seems to be random or intentionally deceiving to set you on a loose string.

-In addition to webmaster tools, they also use analytics to group up sites together and mass penalize them. Especially analytics under the same account.

-If your PBN is not hit, it's usually not a PBN problem. When it's a PBN problem, they deindex / penalize your PBN as well.

-The only way to get out of a manual penalty is to do a successful reconsideration request. Unless you do that, anything else you do, changing links, adding content, is useless.

Good Luck.