Thin Content Example: A Page With Almost Nothing on It
The full history of my voyage up the Turkish bean to the Moon is, by my reckoning, three beans long.
The short answer
- What it is
- Thin content is a page with too little useful text to do its job. It can be a short page, or a long page whose main area is nearly empty.
- Why it matters
- A page with no real value gives search engines little reason to index it. Many thin pages can also waste crawl time on a large site.
- How a crawler should report it
- A crawler should show a thin content warning with the visible word count and the main content word count. This lab warns under 300 total words or under 200 main words.
- Live examples
/lab/thin-content/(positive)/lab/thin-main-content/(positive)/lab/thin-content/near-miss/(near miss)/lab/thin-main-content/near-miss/(near miss)
How little text makes a page too thin to help
Thin content is a page with too little useful text to serve its purpose. Common causes are stub pages, empty category pages, tag archives, and templates with one line of copy. Some pages look long but are not. The nav, header, and footer fill the screen, while the main area holds a few lines. Auto-made location pages often fail in the same way.
Browsers show a thin page just like any other page. Search engines fetch it, read it, and then judge if it helps anyone. Google has said that word count is not a ranking factor, so a short page can rank if it fully answers the query. Yet a page with no real value may be crawled and left out of the index. Google also lists thin content with little or no added value as a reason for a manual action.
To detect it, render the page and count the visible words. Then count again inside <main>, without the nav, header, footer, and cookie notice. This lab flags a page under 300 total words, or under 200 main words. Those limits are only a prompt to look closer. A contact page or a login page can be short and still be fine. Sort the flagged URLs by template to find the source.
To fix a weak page, first decide what it is for. Add the facts, steps, examples, or data that a reader needs. Merge several weak pages into one strong page, and send the old URLs there with a 301 redirect. Remove pages that serve no one, and return a 404 or 410 status. Use noindex if users need a page but searchers do not. Do not pad the text just to reach a number.