Thin Content

Why It Matters

Thin content pages dilute site quality signals even when they exist alongside genuinely strong content. A site with thousands of thin pages alongside quality content has its overall quality assessment lowered, affecting the ranking performance of all pages. For AI SEO, thin content is invisible to AI retrieval systems-it provides nothing citable and may actively harm domain trust signals.

How It Works

Google identifies thin content through automated quality evaluations assessing word count relative to ads and navigation, uniqueness compared to other pages on the same site and across the web, user engagement signals (high bounce rates, low dwell time), and lack of expert signals. AI systems evaluate similar dimensions when determining whether a page is worth including in retrieval indexes.

Use Cases

• Auditing affiliate product review pages that contain only manufacturer description text
• Identifying auto-generated location pages with identical content swapping only city names
• Finding tag and category archive pages that list post titles without any original editorial content
• Detecting doorway pages created solely to funnel traffic to a different destination
• Identifying topic stubs-pages covering a subject in fewer than 300 words without unique insight

Best Practices

• Consolidate multiple thin pages on closely related topics into single, comprehensive pages
• Add genuine original insight, data, or expert analysis to any page currently relying on manufacturer or scraped content
• Apply noindex to thin pages that cannot be substantively improved
• Set a minimum content quality threshold for all new page types before publication
• Regularly audit your content inventory and identify pages that haven't earned organic traffic in 12+ months
• Use information gain as a quality benchmark-ensure every page adds something not available in competing sources