What is thin content?

Thin content is content that adds little or no value for visitors, for example because it is very limited, copied or automatically generated, or consists of thin affiliate pages. What matters is usefulness, not word count: a short page that fully answers the question is not thin content.

Why is thin content a problem?

Poor search results: Google doesn’t want to show pages that don’t help the searcher.
Risk for the whole site: many thin pages can drag down how your website is assessed as a whole.
Wasted crawl budget: crawlers spend time on pages that deliver nothing.

Examples of thin content

Product pages with only the supplier’s description
Local pages where only the place name changes
A category page with no products
Automatically generated or copied text

How do you fix thin content?

Find thin pages with a content audit. Expand a page if it answers a real question, merge related pages with a 301 redirect or remove pages that have no value. Pages that visitors need but that don’t have to be in Google can be set to noindex. See content marketing.

Thin content