Does a Q&A-section cause a problem with thin or duplicate content?

Question

A client wishes to implement a Q&A section where users can ask questions about certain topics that will be answered by experts of that niche and then be published on his site.

Each answered and published question will have its own url, like: "example.com/what-is-the-meaning-of-x". Multiple similar questions will be combined in a single answer and the user will be informed, that an answer already exists. So "What is the meaning of X?" and "what is the true meaning of x?" and "what is the meaning of x if y" won't each get a own URL.

The idea behind this is to provide support but also help Search Rankings (for the direct URL but also the whole site).

Now my question: Would a page with a short answer (maybe like 100-200 words) in Googles eyes be considered "thin content" even if it answers the question perfectly? And what about duplicate content? For example two different questions that touch the same subject and therefore get a kinda similar answer.

Answer 1

Google's page on thin content doesn't say anything about the length of the content, only its value:

Here are a few common examples of pages that often have thin content with little or no added value:

• Automatically generated content
• Thin affiliate pages
• Content from other sources. For example: Scraped content or low-quality guest blog posts
• Doorway pages

These techniques don’t provide users with substantially unique or valuable content

Emphasis mine.

So I would not be worried about a manual action on pages that are unique, relevant, and useful, even if they may only have 100-200 words of real content.

As for duplicate content,

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.

Duplicate Content - Search Console Help

So "similar answers to topics" is not duplicate content in Google's judgement - duplicate content is a substantial amount of content that is either identical word-for-word or a simple thesaurus substitution.

In short, don't worry about an honest Q&A site getting hit with Google penalties, - you're on one and it does just fine.