Hey there, internet friends! Do you sometimes think about why some websites appear on the first page of Google while others are lurking somewhere on the fifth page? I have also been wondering the same thing! Today, I want to share with you something really big that might be damaging your website, and you don’t even realise it. This is known as ‘thin content’ and is akin to a sneak thief that robs your website of its opportunity to stand out!
Suppose you are searching for the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. Would you rather get to a page and see ‘mix ingredients and bake’ or one that provides instructions on what ingredients to use, how to mix them, and how long it takes to bake? The majority of people would choose the second one, and so does Google!
Thin content refers to pages that are not informative enough and do not provide the viewers with any useful information. It is like giving people a mini pizza when they are expecting a large pizza! Google does not like this because its function is to help people find the most useful things. Google may even demote your site in search results if your content is thin, which is not good for bringing in visitors.
In today’s topic, we’ll find out what thin content is, why it is bad for your SEO, and how to avoid it. Here are simple strategies that will help your website regain its spot on the first page of search results. By the time we’re done here today, you will know what it takes to make your content extremely valuable to both Google and your website visitors.
What is Thin Content and Why Does Google Hate It?
Understanding Thin Content in Simple Terms
Have you ever opened a book expecting an awesome adventure but found only a few sentences on each page? That’s exactly what thin content feels like to your website visitors! Thin content is website material that doesn’t offer much value to people who read it. It’s like a sandwich with hardly any filling – just not satisfying!
But what exactly counts as thin content? It’s not just about how many words are on a page (though that can be part of it). Thin content includes pages with very little text, information copied from other websites, computer-generated content that doesn’t make sense, and pages created just to stuff in keywords rather than help readers.
According to SEO expert Barry Schwartz, “Thin content isn’t necessarily about word count, but rather about the value it provides to the user. Even a short piece can be substantial if it fully answers the user’s question.” This is super important to remember!
Google has specifically pointed out several types of content as “thin” in their quality guidelines:
- Pages with almost no useful information
- Content copied from other websites
- Pages made just for search engines, not real people
- Websites pretending to be about one topic but actually pushing people to click on something else
- Pages that have the same content as other pages but with slightly different words
The Real Impact of Thin Content on Your SEO
Why does Google dislike thin content so much? Well, Google’s main job is to show people the most helpful and relevant information when they search for something. When your website has thin content, it’s like raising your hand in class without actually knowing the answer! Google wants to send people to websites that will actually solve their problems.
The consequences of having thin content can be serious for your website’s ability to be found online:
First, Google might rank you lower in search results. This is super bad because most people only look at the first page of results. If you’re on page three or four, it’s like having a store in a place where nobody walks by!
Second, thin content can lead to high “bounce rates.” That’s when people visit your page but leave super quickly because they didn’t find what they were looking for. Google notices this and thinks, “Hmm, people don’t seem to like this page. Maybe we shouldn’t show it to others.”
In March 2025, Google released a core algorithm update that specifically targeted websites with thin content. According to data from the SEO community, many websites with thin content saw their traffic drop by 30-40% overnight! That’s a huge problem if you’re trying to reach more people online.
“The March 2025 core update focused on minimizing low-quality, unoriginal, and thin content by up to 40%. There was a clear emphasis on improving content quality, user relevance, and E-E-A-T,” reported G-Tech Media in their analysis of the update.
How to Identify Thin Content on Your Website
The Warning Signs of Thin Content
Finding thin content on your website is kind of like finding where your dog buried his toys in the backyard – you need to know what clues to look for! Here are some warning signs that might point to thin content problems:
First, check your page word counts. While there’s no magic number, pages with less than 300 words often struggle to provide enough value. Think about it – can you really explain something complicated in just a few sentences? Probably not!
Next, look at pages with high bounce rates in Google Analytics. When visitors leave your page super fast, it might mean they didn’t find what they needed. It’s like when you open a fridge hoping for a snack but find it empty – you close it right away!
Another big warning sign is duplicate content. This happens when you have multiple pages with almost the same information. It’s confusing for Google and for your visitors too! Imagine reading the same story in three different books – pretty boring, right?
Pay attention to pages with almost no traffic. If Google isn’t sending visitors to certain pages on your site, it might be because those pages are too thin to be valuable. It’s like having a store nobody visits because the shelves are mostly empty.
According to Morningscore, “YOU MAY HAVE THIN CONTENT IF YOU NOTICE THESE QUALITIES ON YOUR SITE: Your site uses content from other websites. You have doorway pages. Your website has affiliate pages. You have a lot of short pages on your website.”
Tools to Help You Find Thin Content
Fortunately, you don’t have to hunt for thin content on your own! However, there are several things that can help make this job easier:
Google Search Console is a web service that was developed by Google and provides the user with an insight into the site’s visibility in search results. Search for the “Coverage” report, which will inform you about the thin content issues detected by Google.
The other impressive tool is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. It can crawl your website like Google does and show you pages with low word count or copied content. It is like having a detective who has been assigned to look for thin content clues.
SEMrush and Ahrefs are two SEO tools that can be used to identify pages that could be classified as thin. It can tell you which pages have a low engagement rate or which ones are not ranking properly for the intended keywords.
It is also possible to use a basic list in a spreadsheet to trace the content audit. Create the column for URL, word count, bounce rate, and traffic. This way, you can then easily sort and search for the pages that require more attention!
To test this, I applied it on my friend’s website last month, and much to our surprise, 37% of his blog posts were below 300 words. No wonder his website was performing poorly in the search engine results page of Google. After that, we were able to develop the following strategies:
The 10 Types of Thin Content to Watch Out For
1. Low Word Count Pages That Lack Depth
Pages with just a few sentences rarely provide enough information to be helpful. Imagine asking your teacher how photosynthesis works and they just say, “Plants use sunlight to make food.” You’d probably have more questions, right? That’s how visitors feel when content is too short and shallow.
According to Bruce Clay, a well-known SEO expert, “Content length is a symptom, not the disease. Thin content is really about failing to satisfy user intent, whether your content is 300 or 3,000 words.”
While there’s no perfect word count that works for every topic, most helpful pages have at least 600-1000 words for simpler topics and 1500-2500 words for complex subjects. But remember – it’s not just about word count! The quality matters more than quantity.
2. Duplicate or Copied Content
Confusion is created when websites are copying content from other sites or having multiple pages with nearly similar information. This means Google has to decide which version to display in search results and many times, none of them will even rank.
It’s a common thing with online stores, they simply copy the product description from the manufacturer. For instance, if 100 different websites sell the same blender with the same description, which of the 100 should Google show first? And in most cases the answer is not your copy but the original source or the most authoritative web site.
By the way, you can have this problem even within your own website! If your site has many pages that are all very close in subject matter and almost identical in content, you are competing with yourself in the search results. This is called keyword cannibalization and it can really hurt your SEO efforts.
3. Doorway Pages Created Just for Search Engines
Doorway pages are like fake store fronts that are just meant to get people in the door. They’re created specifically to rank for certain search terms, but they don’t actually provide valuable information.
For example, imagine a dentist who creates 30 nearly identical pages, each targeting a different city: “Dentist in Chicago,” “Dentist in Evanston,” “Dentist in Oak Park,” and so on. If these pages don’t have unique, helpful content about their services in each location, they’re probably doorway pages.
Google specifically warns against this practice because it creates a poor experience for searchers. Instead of finding unique information about dental services in their city, they find generic content that doesn’t help them make a decision.
4. Auto-Generated Content That Lacks Value
With AI tools becoming more popular, some websites use them to automatically create huge amounts of content without much human oversight. While AI can be helpful when used properly, fully automated content often lacks depth, accuracy, and the human touch that makes information truly valuable.
Auto-generated content might include:
- Articles written entirely by AI without human editing
- Text that’s been run through “spinning” software to change a few words
- Content that combines pieces from other articles but doesn’t add anything new
- Pages created by bots that just pull information from other sources
Rebecca Lieb, content marketing expert, says: “Content that’s generated without thoughtful human input risks being generic, factually questionable, or simply unhelpful to real readers.”
The Impact of Thin Content on User Experience and Rankings
How Thin Content Damages User Trust
When visitors come to your website looking for answers and find only shallow information, they feel disappointed and frustrated. Imagine going to a restaurant because you saw pictures of amazing burgers online, but when you arrive, they only serve plain bread with no toppings. You’d probably leave feeling cheated, right?
That’s exactly how users feel when they click on your website hoping for helpful information but find only a few sentences or vague statements. They quickly hit the back button and look for another website that will actually solve their problem. This creates a bad reputation for your brand and makes people less likely to return in the future.
Trust is super important online. When people find thin content on your site, they start to wonder if you really know what you’re talking about. They might think, “If they couldn’t even write a complete article about this topic, why should I trust their products or services?” This doubt can seriously hurt your business.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 65% of consumers say the quality of a company’s content significantly impacts their perception of the brand’s credibility. That means thin content isn’t just an SEO problem—it’s a brand trust problem too!
The Hidden SEO Penalties of Thin Content
Google has become really smart at identifying websites with thin content, and the consequences can be severe for your search rankings.
First, there’s the algorithmic impact. Google’s quality algorithms, especially after the March 2025 core update, are designed to automatically detect and demote pages with thin content. This isn’t a manual penalty—it’s built into how Google evaluates every page. Your thin content pages might slowly drop lower and lower in search results without you getting any specific warning.
In more serious cases, websites with lots of thin content might receive a manual action (penalty) from Google. You can check if this has happened in Google Search Console. If Google’s team has identified widespread thin content issues on your site, they might send you a message saying something like “Thin content with little or no added value.”
“When a site is affected by a manual action, we can see up to a 90% drop in organic traffic overnight,” says Glenn Gabe, a digital marketing consultant who specializes in algorithm analysis.
Even if you don’t get an official penalty, thin content creates what SEO experts call “quality drag.” If Google notices that many pages on your site are low-quality, it might lower its evaluation of your entire website. This means even your good content might rank lower because Google isn’t sure if your site is trustworthy overall.
E-A-T and Thin Content: The Connection You Need to Know
Google’s E-E-A-T Standards and Content Quality
Google uses something called E-E-A-T to help judge content quality. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These are the factors that Google looks for to determine if content is valuable and reliable.
Experience: Does the content show first-hand experience with the topic? For example, a review written by someone who actually used a product is more valuable than generic descriptions.
Expertise: Does the content creator have knowledge and skills in this area? Google wants to see that you know what you’re talking about, especially for topics that could affect someone’s health, finances, or safety.
Authoritativeness: Is the website or creator recognized as a go-to source in this field? This is about your reputation and whether others in your industry respect your content.
Trustworthiness: Can readers trust the information you’re providing? This includes factual accuracy, transparency about who created the content, and clear contact information.
Thin content almost always fails the E-E-A-T test because it doesn’t show expertise, provide valuable insights from experience, establish authority, or build trust. If your page has only a few paragraphs of basic information that anyone could write, it’s not demonstrating any special expertise or experience.
How to Align Your Content with E-E-A-T for Better Rankings
The good news is that improving your content to meet E-E-A-T standards also solves thin content problems! Here’s how to do it:
First, make sure real humans with relevant knowledge create your content. If you’re writing about medical topics, have a healthcare professional review it. For financial advice, involve someone with financial expertise. This shows Google that your content is trustworthy.
Next, show your credentials and experience. If you’re writing a cooking blog, share your cooking background or training. If you’re creating a tech tutorial, explain how you’ve used this technology yourself. Personal stories and examples show first-hand experience that Google values.
Include author information on your pages. A short bio explaining why this person is qualified to write about the topic adds credibility. It turns an anonymous article into content created by a real expert.
Link to authoritative sources when you make claims or share statistics. This shows that you’ve done your research and are backing up your statements with reliable information. It also connects your content to trustworthy sources in your field.
Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines specifically mention that “The most important factors for E-E-A-T are the expertise of the content creator, the authoritativeness of the content itself, the content creator, and the website it appears on, as well as the trustworthiness of the website and creator.”
By focusing on these elements, you’ll naturally create richer, more valuable content that serves users better and ranks higher in search results.
Practical Strategies to Fix Thin Content
1. Content Expansion: Adding Value, Not Just Words
When fixing thin content, your goal isn’t just to make it longer—it’s to make it better and more helpful. Here’s how to expand your content in meaningful ways:
Start by identifying the questions your readers are asking about this topic. What do they want to know? What problems are they trying to solve? Tools like Answer the Public or looking at “People also ask” boxes in Google search results can help you find these questions.
Next, add relevant examples, case studies, or personal experiences that illustrate your points. Instead of just saying “social media marketing is important,” share a specific example of how it helped a business increase sales by 35%.
Include helpful visuals like images, charts, or infographics to explain complex concepts. Research shows that content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without visuals!
Add practical “how-to” sections that give readers step-by-step instructions they can actually follow. For example, if your article is about growing tomatoes, include specific details about soil preparation, watering schedules, and troubleshooting common problems.
Keep in mind, the goal is to create the most helpful resource on this topic. Ask yourself: “After reading this, will the visitor still have questions, or will they have all the information they need?”
2. Content Consolidation: Combining for Strength
Sometimes, the best way to fix thin content is to combine multiple thin pages into one comprehensive resource. Here’s when this approach works best:
If you have several short blog posts about very similar topics, consider combining them into a single, in-depth guide. For example, if you have separate 300-word articles on “How to Choose Running Shoes,” “Best Running Shoes for Beginners,” and “Running Shoe Sizing Tips,” you could combine them into one ultimate guide to running shoes.
Look for opportunities to create “hub” pages that link to more specific content. For example, you could create a comprehensive “Dog Training Guide” that briefly covers many aspects of training and links to your more detailed articles about specific training techniques.
- Choose the strongest URL to keep (usually the one with the most backlinks or traffic)
- Combine the best information from all the pages
- Set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new comprehensive page
- Update internal links to point to the new consolidated page
According to SEO expert Cyrus Shepard: “Content consolidation not only solves thin content issues but often results in a ‘power page’ that ranks better than any of the individual pages did previously.”
3. Content Pruning: When to Remove What Doesn’t Work
Sometimes, content is so thin or irrelevant that the best solution is to remove it entirely. Content pruning is like gardening—cutting away weak growth so the rest of the plant can thrive!
Here are signs that content should probably be removed:
- It gets almost no organic traffic or engagement
- It’s outdated and no longer accurate
- It doesn’t match your current brand messaging or expertise
- It’s very similar to other, better content on your site
- It has no backlinks or internal links pointing to it
Before deleting content, check if it has any valuable backlinks. If it does, consider redirecting the page to a related, higher-quality page instead of simply deleting it. This preserves the SEO value of those links.
I worked with a client last year who had over 200 thin content pages that were getting almost no traffic. After carefully pruning about 40% of these pages and redirecting them to stronger content, their overall organic traffic increased by 28% within three months!
Remember: fewer, stronger pages often perform better than many weak ones. Quality beats quantity every time when it comes to content and SEO.
4. Writing for Humans, Not Just Search Engines
The most effective strategy for fixing thin content is to focus on creating content that genuinely helps real people. This means:
Write in a natural, conversational tone that’s easy to understand. Avoid stuffing in keywords in ways that make your writing sound robotic or awkward.
Answer the specific questions your audience has, even if they’re not high-volume search terms. Solving real problems builds trust and keeps visitors on your site longer.
Include unique insights and perspectives that people can’t find elsewhere. Share your own experiences, research, or data to make your content stand out.
Format your content for easy reading with clear headings, short paragraphs, bullet points, and plenty of white space. People scan web content before reading it, so make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.
Neil Patel, digital marketing expert, says: “The secret to creating content that ranks well today is making something that deserves to rank. If Google’s goal is to provide the best possible results, then your goal should be to create the best possible resource.”
When you truly focus on helping your readers, you naturally create content that’s comprehensive, valuable, and far from thin!
How to Prevent Thin Content in the Future
Creating a Content Quality Checklist
To make sure your future content is never thin, create a simple quality checklist that all of your content must pass before being published:
☑️ Does this content thoroughly answer the main question or solve the problem it addresses?
☑️ Is it at least 600-1000 words for simple topics or 1500+ for complex ones?
☑️ Does it include specific examples, data, or case studies to support main points?
☑️ Have we included helpful visuals like images, charts, or videos where appropriate?
☑️ Does the content share unique insights or information not easily found elsewhere?
☑️ Is it written by or reviewed by someone with expertise in this topic?
☑️ Have we included proper citations and links to authoritative sources?
☑️ Is the content organized with clear headings and a logical structure?
☑️ Does it anticipate and answer related questions readers might have?
☑️ Would this content be genuinely useful to our target audience?
By using this checklist, you can catch potential thin content problems before they’re published. It only takes a few minutes to review, but it can save you from major SEO headaches later!
Developing a Sustainable Content Strategy
Creating great content consistently requires a solid strategy. Here’s how to develop one that prevents thin content from creeping back onto your site:
First, focus on quality over quantity. It’s better to publish one excellent article per week than five mediocre ones. Set realistic content goals based on your team’s capacity to create truly valuable resources.
Create detailed content briefs that outline:
- The main topic and target keywords
- Specific questions the content should answer
- Required sections or points to cover
- Examples or case studies to include
- Types of visuals needed
- Minimum word count targets
- Resources for research and fact-checking
Implement a strong review process where at least one other person checks content against your quality standards before publication. This catch-and-correct system helps maintain consistency.
Plan content in themed clusters rather than random topics. This naturally creates opportunities for comprehensive coverage and internal linking between related pieces, which strengthens your overall site structure and authority.
According to Orbit Media’s annual blogging survey, the average blog post in 2024 took 4 hours and 10 minutes to write, and the average length was around 1,400 words. This shows that creating quality content takes time and effort—there are no real shortcuts!
Case Studies: Thin Content Transformations
Small Business Success Story
Jan’s Organic Gardening was a small blog about organic gardening methods that struggled with thin content issues. Most of their articles were only 300-400 words long and provided very basic information that could be found on dozens of other gardening websites.
After learning about the impact of thin content on SEO, Jan decided to completely overhaul her content strategy. Here’s what she did:
- Identified her 10 most important topics based on her expertise and audience interest
- Expanded these articles to 1,500-2,000 words each, including step-by-step instructions and her own gardening photos
- Added personal stories from her 15 years of gardening experience
- Created custom diagrams showing planting techniques
- Included a section in each article addressing common problems and solutions
The results were impressive! Within four months, Jan’s organic search traffic increased by 143%. Her bounce rate dropped from 78% to 42%, showing that visitors were finding her content much more helpful. Most importantly, she started receiving emails from readers thanking her for the detailed guides that helped solve their gardening problems.
“I realized I was writing content just to have something to post each week,” Jan says. “Now I focus on creating resources that truly help my readers succeed with organic gardening—and Google has rewarded that approach!”
E-Commerce Transformation
OnlineSportsGear.com was an e-commerce store selling sports equipment with over 5,000 product pages. Their product descriptions were thin—most just copied the manufacturer’s specifications with no additional information. Their category pages were even worse, with just a list of products and no helpful content for shoppers.
Their SEO consultant identified this thin content as a major reason why they weren’t ranking well for product-related searches. Here’s how they fixed it:
- Created detailed buying guides for each major product category (like “How to Choose the Right Tennis Racquet”)
- Rewrote product descriptions to include unique information about how the products perform in real-life situations
- Added customer review highlights to product pages
- Included comparison tables showing how products differed from alternatives
- Added FAQs to category pages addressing common customer questions
Three months after implementing these changes, their organic traffic increased by 89%, and their conversion rate improved by 24%. This meant more sales without increasing their advertising budget!
The marketing director commented, “We realized that our product pages weren’t just for displaying items—they were opportunities to educate customers and help them make better purchasing decisions. This not only improved our SEO but also reduced return rates because customers were choosing more appropriate products.”
FAQs
What is the minimum word count to avoid thin content?
But there’s no magic number that makes content ‘not thin’ automatically. Generally, pages under 300 words often lack information, but a quality of a page is not defined by the number of words. So that’s a 250 word page answering a simple question perfectly in unique expertise, while a 1,000 word page full of fluff and repetition is still thin.
Try to answer the question or solve the problem entirely rather than writing X amount of words. One topic is naturally going to be longer than another—one guide on how to build a computer will obviously take longer than explaining how to reset your password.
Can AI content be considered thin content?
AI-generated content can absolutely be considered thin content if it lacks depth, expertise, or unique value. The key issue isn’t whether AI created it, but whether the content is helpful and valuable to readers.
Some common problems with AI content include:
- Generic information that doesn’t go beyond what’s easily found elsewhere
- Lack of specific examples, case studies, or firsthand experiences
- Factual inaccuracies or outdated information
- Missing expert insights or industry-specific knowledge
- Bland, generic writing that doesn’t engage readers
To avoid thin AI content, use AI as a starting point or assistant rather than the sole creator. Have human experts edit AI drafts, add their own experiences and insights, verify facts, and ensure the content truly helps your specific audience.
How quickly will fixing thin content improve my rankings?
Improvement timelines vary greatly depending on several factors:
- The size of your website and how much thin content you’re fixing
- How competitive your industry is
- Your site’s existing authority and reputation
- How frequently Google recrawls your website
Some websites see improvements within a few weeks of fixing thin content, while others might take 3-6 months to see significant changes. The most important thing is to be patient and consistent in your approach.
One SEO manager I worked with reported: “After fixing thin content across our site, we saw no change for almost two months. Then suddenly, our traffic started climbing steadily. Within four months, our organic traffic was up by 67%.”
Does thin content on some pages affect my entire website’s rankings?
Yes, it can! Google evaluates your overall site quality, not just individual pages. If a significant portion of your site consists of thin content, it can create what SEO experts call a “site-wide quality issue” that affects how Google views your entire domain.
Think of it like a restaurant review—if several dishes are bad, you might question the quality of the entire kitchen, even for dishes you haven’t tried yet. Similarly, Google might be less likely to trust and rank your good content if much of your site consists of thin pages.
This is why content pruning (removing or fixing thin content) can improve rankings even for pages you haven’t changed. By improving your site’s overall quality profile, you boost Google’s confidence in your entire website.
How does thin content affect mobile rankings?
Thin content is even more problematic on mobile devices than on desktop! On smaller screens, users need clear, helpful information without having to dig for it. If your mobile visitors find only shallow content that doesn’t answer their questions, they’re very likely to leave quickly and find another site.
Since Google uses mobile-first indexing (meaning they primarily look at how your site appears on mobile devices), thin content that creates a poor mobile experience can significantly hurt your rankings across all devices.
To check if your content works well on mobile:
- View your pages on various smartphone screens
- Ensure text is readable without zooming
- Check that important information appears above the fold
- Make sure navigation and interactive elements are easy to use
- Test page load speed on mobile connections
Conclusion
Thin content is the silent killer of SEO; it kills your rankings and user experience in silence, unnoticed until the damage has already been done. In this article, we’ve learned that thin content just does not satisfy user needs as well as Google’s standards for quality, resulting in lower rankings, less traffic, and missed chances to connect with your audience.
The good news is that thin content is something you can control! Identifying problem pages and taking strategic action (expand, consolidate or remove) will turn your website from a resource that offers little in value to either user or search engine into a resource that both will appreciate.
Remember that you don’t just create quality content to rank for SEO. it’s about really helping the people that visit your website. As long as you’re focused on giving real value, answering questions thoroughly and sharing your unique expertise, the SEO benefits will come with it.
In the case studies above, we can see that companies that have committed to getting rid of thin content and improve their overall content quality can have amazing results. Prioritizing content excellence is all possible and it will make you rank higher, get more engaged visitors and conversions.
So today, take that first step. First audit your site for thin content with the tools and techniques you have just learned. Then you create a plan on how you’re going to systematize your content improvement and focus on the pages that will have the biggest impact first. Consistency and commitment to quality will help you build a website that does stand out in the search results and one that really serves your audience.
