“Thin” isn’t about word count alone. A 120-word page with a business’s opening hours and phone number can be exactly what someone needs. A 1,500-word article that rambles without answering anything is thin in every way that counts. The test is whether the page gives a visitor something useful they couldn’t get from the other results.
Common examples
- Doorway pages: dozens of near-identical “plumber in [city]” pages with the city name swapped and nothing else
- Product pages with only the manufacturer’s two-line description
- Tag and category archives with one or two posts
- Affiliate pages that repeat the merchant’s information and add no testing or opinion
- Auto-generated or AI-generated pages published at scale without review or original input
- Placeholder pages (“Coming soon”) left live for months
Why it matters
Google’s systems aim to reward helpful content written for people. Thin pages are less likely to be indexed at all (they often show as “Crawled, currently not indexed” in Search Console), and a large share of thin pages can weigh on how Google assesses the site as a whole.
Coastline Plumbing once created 40 suburb pages, each with the same 150 words. None of them ranked, and the effort distracted from the six main service pages that actually brought in calls. The fix was to cut the 40 pages to eight areas they genuinely serve often, and write each one properly: local response times, common problems in that area (older homes with galvanized pipes, hard water), a short job example, and reviews from customers there.
How to fix thin content
For each thin page, choose one of four options:
- Improve it. Add the detail a customer would want: pricing guidance, photos, process, FAQs from real customer calls, proof.
- Merge it into a stronger page on the same topic and 301-redirect the old URL.
- Noindex it if it’s useful for visitors but not for search (thin tag archives, for example).
- Delete it if it serves no one, and let it return a 404.
Common mistakes
Padding pages with filler text to hit a word count. Longer isn’t better if the extra words don’t help. Another mistake is building pages with programmatic SEO without unique data for each one, which produces thin pages at scale and can run into Google’s scaled content abuse policy.
How to check
RankThat’s Site Audit flags pages with very little text and pages with a low text-to-code ratio. Search Console’s “Crawled, currently not indexed” list is another strong hint. Pages that once performed but have slipped may need a content refresh rather than removal.