Thin content confusion

[kenroar]

I have been watching several websites that appear to be violating good SEO and best practices from Google. One of these is <SITE A>. <SITE A> posts a series of images copied from across the internet with a headline. When you click on the images and/or headline you get a couple of paragraphs that have been directly copied from various news sites. Alexa ranks them as <Top 10,000> in the US. They are not the only ones. Many similar websites such as <SITE B> are now popping up and all do well in the SERPS. How is it that they don't get penalized for thin content? There appears to be little original content on these types of sites. The bottom half of each page seem to be affiliate content or advertising. If this isn't thin content, then what is? Any ideas? Everything I'm hearing both here at Webmaster World and the Google forums say these pages shouldn't be ranking.

[edited by: goodroi at 10:19 am (utc) on Nov 5, 2014]
[edit reason] Please no outing reports :) [/edit]

[goodroi]

Google generally does not like thin content pages. It is often harder to make a thin content page to rank well. It is still possible to legitimately and illegitimately make a thin content page rank.

Legitimately, there are some thin content pages like online calculators that rank because they are great at satisfying users. Because they satisfy users they gain a lot of quality backlinks and other ranking signals.

There are always weaknesses in the Google algo that a smart webmaster can exploit. Spammy pages and borderline spammy pages will be with us for a long time. Of course it is risky and in the long term this can cause penalties and/or bannnings so you might not want to do what you see others do.

[netmeg]

Are they ranking for anything important? I'm aware of several sites of this nature in my niche - some of them actually have stolen screenshots of my sites (and I don't have any pictures, which makes it even more stupid) and my Google alerts were flooded with them for a couple weeks, then they (obviously) lost their AdSense accounts, then they stopped ranking for anything useful. Looking them up in various SEO tools, they still have thousands or tens of thousands of pages in the index, but they only really rank for nonsense phrases and very long tail non-money search terms.

Anyone can get a poor quality site or sites to rank in Google for a while. Sustained ranking over time is a whole nother kettle of fish.

[paulsimmons]

Content is not the only ranking factor, There are other hundreds of factor that drives ranking so if a website compromises in content factor then it can still be on top by focusing on other important factors like website traffic, useability, bounce rate etc