What is thin content?
Thin content is content that gives a visitor little or nothing they could not get elsewhere, or nothing at all. Google's spam policies name specific forms: doorway pages built to rank for variations of a query, scraped content copied from other sites, automatically generated text with no added value, and affiliate pages that repeat the merchant's description without original input.
Thin is about value, not word count. A 150-word page that answers a simple question completely is not thin. A 2,000-word page that restates what the top ten results already say, with nothing original, can be.
How it works
Google evaluates pages individually but also forms a view of a site as a whole. Its helpful content guidance, folded into the core ranking systems in 2024, says a large amount of unhelpful content can weigh down how the rest of a site performs. That is why pruning or improving weak pages sometimes helps strong ones.
Thin pages also show up in indexing. URLs listed as "Crawled - currently not indexed" in Search Console are often ones Google judged not worth indexing. Pages that look empty may be reported as soft 404s.
Common sources on real sites: tag pages with one post, location pages that swap only the city name, product pages with a single line of text, auto-generated pages from databases, and short posts published to hit a schedule.
Example
A plumbing company publishes 80 pages titled "Plumber in [Town]", each with the same three paragraphs and the town name replaced. These are doorway pages. A better approach is fewer pages with real, local detail where it exists: the team that covers that area, typical jobs there, response times, and reviews from local customers. Where there is nothing specific to say about a town, it does not need its own page.
In WordPress
WordPress generates thin pages by default: attachment pages for every image (WordPress 6.4 disabled them on new installs), tag archives with one or two posts, and author archives on single-author sites. SEO plugins let you noindex these types. Hydrogen SEO's Robots screen does this per type, and its Noindex Empty Archives setting keeps empty terms out of the index. Its on-page SEO score includes content length as one of five parts, a rough signal, not a verdict; see on-page SEO analysis.
Common mistakes
- Padding pages with filler to reach a word count.
- Mass-producing pages from templates or AI output without human review or original information.
- Deleting useful short pages because a tool called them thin.
Common questions
How many words make a page thin?
There is no word count threshold. A page is thin when it does not satisfy the visitor's need or adds nothing beyond other pages.
Should I delete thin content?
Improve pages that have potential, merge overlapping ones with a 301 redirect, and noindex or remove pages with no purpose. Deleting helps only when the page has no value to anyone.