Thin Content
Pages with little or no useful content. Doorway pages, auto-generated content, scraped content. Google devalues thin content and it can drag down your site's overall quality signals.
Why It Matters
Google's Helpful Content system evaluates your site holistically. Having a large number of thin content pages doesn't just mean those individual pages rank poorly - it can drag down the ranking potential of your entire site. Google sees thin content as a quality signal for the whole domain.
Thin content takes many forms: auto-generated pages with no unique value, boilerplate content with just a location name swapped out, scraped or spun content, and pages that exist purely to target a keyword with minimal effort.
In Practice
Audit your site for thin pages. Look for pages with very little unique content, high bounce rates, zero engagement, and no organic traffic. Use site:yourdomain.com in Google to see what's actually indexed - you might find hundreds of pages that add no value.
Fix thin content by either improving it (add real value, unique information, depth) or removing it (noindex or delete). Consolidating multiple thin pages into one comprehensive page often works best.
Pay special attention to auto-generated pages: tag archives, author archives, date archives, and filtered product pages. These are common sources of thin content that accumulate without anyone noticing.
Common Mistakes
Creating location pages that are identical except for the city name. Publishing short, shallow blog posts just to hit a publishing cadence. Keeping old, outdated pages live that no longer provide value. Ignoring auto-generated thin pages from CMS defaults.
Related Terms
Glossary
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness - Google's quality framework.
Glossary
Indexing
Adding a crawled page to Google's database so it can appear in search results.
Glossary
Crawl Budget
How many pages Google will crawl on your site in a given timeframe.
Glossary
Content Cluster
A group of related pages around a core topic, connected by internal links.
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