Question About Thin Content

[mostcg]

Hello,

We have an encyclopedia type page on our e-commerce site. Basically, it's a page with a list of terms related to our niche, product definitions, slang terms, etc.

The terms on the encyclopedia page are each linked to their own page that contains the term and a very short definition (about 1-2 sentences).

The purpose of these is to link them on product pages if a product has a feature or function that may be new to our customers.

We have about 82 of these pages. Are these pages more likely to help us because they're providing information to visitors, or are they likely to hurt us because of the very small amount of content on each page?

Thanks for the help!

[mostcg]

Thank you EGOL!

[EGOL]

I would be afraid of 82 pages with a sentence or two.  I would take one of two routes if this was my site...

A) Beef up each of these pages to one or two photos and one or two paragraphs, at least 100 words total.

B) Place all 82 of the definitions on a single big page that has on-page anchors so that links from other parts of your site can point straight to the definition.

We have an industry glossary on one of our sites with a few thousand terms.  Most terms are accompanied by one photo and 50 to 200 words of text.  We don't have individual pages for each term.  Instead we have 26 pages, one for each letter of the alphabet.  Some of these pages have over 100 terms.   For several hundred of these terms we also have a substantive article with 500 to 5000 words and numerous photos.  So, the bold term in the glossary links to the substantive article page.

Back in the early 2000s, the glossary was a good source of links and it got a lot of traffic.  The value of the glossary for attracting links and traffic has declined over time.  The value of the article collection has grown.