Search and SEO
What is Thin content?
Thin content is a page with little or no value to the person who arrived on it — auto-generated text, a near-duplicate of another page, a doorway, or a page that exists to target a keyword rather than to answer anything. It is a quality judgement, not a word count.
Also called: low-value content
What makes content thin
Not length. A 200-word page that completely answers a specific question is not thin; a 2,000-word page that circles a topic without answering anything is. The test is whether someone who arrived from the query leaves satisfied.
The common patterns
- Location pages differing only by place name
- Product pages carrying the manufacturer description everyone else published
- Tag and archive pages listing two items
- Pages generated from a data source with no editorial layer on top
- Content written to a keyword brief by someone who has never done the thing
The 2024 policy change worth knowing
Google’s scaled content abuse policy targets generating many pages primarily to manipulate rankings, and it applies regardless of whether a human or a machine produced them. Volume alone is now a signal, which changes the calculation on publishing hundreds of pages quickly.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. The 35 types of SEO, explained without the padding covers this properly — 6 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.