Some pages on your site are doing more harm than good
A page with a title, a sentence, and nothing else. A product listing with just a name and a price. A tag page that's basically an empty list. These are thin pages — and they drag down your entire site's quality in Google's eyes.
What counts as "thin"
There's no exact word count that makes a page thin. It's about value. A 200-word page that perfectly answers a specific question is fine. A 500-word page of generic filler is thin.
That said, pages with fewer than 300 words of substantive content are almost always a red flag. Common examples:
- Auto-generated tag/category pages with just a heading and a list of links
- Product pages with only a title, price, and "add to cart"
- Placeholder pages that were created but never filled with content
- Doorway pages targeting slight keyword variations with nearly identical content
- Profile pages with just a name and an avatar
Why Google cares
Google's Panda algorithm was built specifically to identify and devalue thin content. The reasoning is simple: if a page doesn't provide enough information to satisfy a searcher's query, it shouldn't rank.
But it's worse than just not ranking. Too many thin pages on your site can lower Google's quality assessment of the entire domain. One weak page is fine. A hundred weak pages are a problem.
The fix isn't always "add more words"
Consolidate. If you have 10 thin pages about similar topics, combine them into one comprehensive page. 301 redirect the old URLs to the new one.
Expand. If the page covers a valid topic but is too shallow, add depth. Include examples, data, context, related information.
Noindex. For pages that need to exist (like empty search results or internal tool pages) but shouldn't be in Google's index, add a noindex tag.
Delete. If the page provides no value and isn't needed, remove it. Return a 410 status so Google drops it from the index quickly.
How to find thin pages
You can't evaluate content depth by looking at URLs. You need a crawler that:
- Measures the word count of each page's main content
- Flags pages below a threshold (typically 300 words)
- Identifies pages with no body content at all
- Groups thin pages by template or section to spot patterns
Kaitico measures the word count of every crawled page and flags thin content, helping you identify which pages need expansion, consolidation, or removal.