Thin Content: How to Find and Fix It

Thin content is any page that fails to satisfy the person who searched for it: too short, too generic, or too unhelpful to deserve a ranking. In 2026 it matters more than ever. Google’s helpful content systems are built to find and demote it, and AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity skip straight past thin pages when choosing what to cite. If your content does not add something a reader cannot get elsewhere, it is invisible to both.

The fastest way to check a page is to run it through my free low quality content checker. Paste the content and you get an instant quality score with the exact issues to fix, thin word count, keyword stuffing, AI filler, weak specificity, and missing first-hand experience. Then use the rest of this guide to fix what it flags.

With SEO, you need content to rank. Content that provides value. In other words, not “Thin Content”. 

Thin Content doesn’t provide users with a good user experience. Search engines know this. And because of this, they don’t rank well let alone get indexed. 

What is Thin Content? 

Thin content is content on a web page with little to no value to the user. This can include low-quality content, low word count content, poorly written content, duplicate content, scraped content, and so forth. 

Types of Thin Content 

Commonly, “Thin” content makes SEOs think about word count. To solve it, they can just add more words. However, this isn’t how it works. 

Thin content doesn’t only consider word count. It considers quality and user experience. Because of this, there are various types of thin content. 

Low Word Count Content 

Google ranks content that is informative, trustworthy, and helpful. This is otherwise known as E-E-A-T. 

With low word count pages, they mostly don’t follow E-E-A-T. We’re talking about pages 300-400 words long or lower.

This is okay for some keywords and pages. However, for the most part, content should be much longer than this to provide a great user experience. 

Unhelpful Content 

Again, this falls under the E-E-A-T guidelines. Thin content could also be unhelpful content. Content that doesn’t help the user. 

The best way to determine whether your content is unhelpful is by looking at what’s ranking on the SERPs. See what the top 3 pages have compared to yours. You’ll be surprised what “extra” information is missing. 

Poorly Written Content 

Alongside the above, if the content is poorly written, it’s also classed as thin. This isn’t just poor grammar or spelling, either. It’s poor use of heading tags, paragraphs, and even cases of keyword stuffing. 

Source: Express Writers

Content should one, engage the reader, two, fulfil the searcher's intent, and three, be easy for search engine crawlers to understand. 

Scraped Content 

Scraped content is content that is copied from other websites and/or sources without referencing or permission. This is otherwise known as plagiarism. 

You can use various tools to detect plagiarised content. For instance, Copyscape or Originality. These will tell you what content you’ve copied or who’s copied your content. 

The problem occurs because of uniqueness. Search engines want unique content. Content that is thin (or scraped) isn’t unique. It’s copied. 

Duplicate Content 

Duplicate content shouldn’t get mixed with scraped content. 

Scraped content is plagiarised content from other web pages. However, duplicate content is the same content (titles, page content, and meta tags) on multiple pages on the same website. 

This is just an example of how to use Copyscape to find duplicate content. The duplicate content found is the author's bio. 

In some cases, you’ll have duplicate content. That’s where canonical tags come into play. These say to search engines, “Hey, rank this content over anything else that’s similar”. This will stop search engines from penalising duplicate content. 

Doorway Pages 

Doorway pages are website pages that just rank by stuffing keywords or links to low-value sites. 

An example would be a Local Search Directory or something similar. It has low-quality, low-word count content that serves very little purpose apart from linking to another website.

Reference: Example of Doorway Page

Author Pages 

Author pages for blogs usually have low word count content. Not only that, sometimes duplicate content, as the website uses the same author summary on the blog as on the author page. 

You either need to make the author page unique or noindex it. Many people noindex them as they don’t have a huge SEO impact.

AI Content

Lastly, we have AI content. This is a sensitive topic in SEO. Google has announced that it won’t penalise AI content. However, it will penalise poor AI content. 

To an untrained eye, AI content looks great. A small prompt and a click will give you a full blog post. Great, super easy. But that’s the problem. It’s too easy. 

Everybody has access to AI now. It’s affordable. That also means everyone is producing AI content. It’s not unique, it’s not 100% factual, and it’s certainly not better than reading human-written text (yet). 

How Does Thin Content Impact SEO 

As you know, thin content refers to web pages that offer visitors little to no value. In other words, it doesn’t help or fulfil their search intent. And because of this, they rank poorly or never even get indexed. 

The crackdown on thin content really comes from the 2011 Panda algorithm update. The goal of this update was to decrease the rank of thin content to improve user experience. Though it’s now very old, it’s still a core value at Google. 

In 2018, they took this a step further. They introduced E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), meaning web pages needed to fulfil these three areas to be considered non-thin and of quality. 

A few years later, in 2022, they updated E-A-T to E-E-A-T; the extra “E” was for “Experience”. This further improved the user experience. 

And the main problem is that thin content doesn’t fulfil these areas. And with content that doesn’t fulfil this area is considered a poor user experience and, therefore, impacts SEO performance. 

How to Find Thin Content 

There are a few ways that you can find thin content on your website. Some are free, and some are paid. 

Google Search Console 

Google Search Console (Or GSC) is a way to identify thin content. Here’s how: 

1. Go to GSC and log in.
2. Click “Security & Manual Actions” 
3. Select “Manual Actions”

This will then pull up any issues that GSC can detect. This includes thin content. Once updated, you can ask GSC to review your website and update the Manual Actions section. 

SEO Software 

The easiest way to check for thin pages is to use SEO software like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Each of them has a similar process: 

1. Go over to your SEO software. 
2. Perform a site audit. 
3. Once the site audit is complete, go to “Issues” 

Once you’ve clicked on “Issues”, it’ll pull up a few technical issues with your website. Thin content can be found in issues such as: 

• Title tag issues 
• Performance issues 
• Redirect issues 
• Internal linking issues 
• Or duplicate content issues 

Spider Software 

With spider software, such as Screaming Frog, you can also find thin pages. With Screaming Frog, you can perform a crawl on the following areas: 

• Flesh Reading Ease Score 
• Spelling Errors 
• Grammar Errors 
• Word Count 

Each of these can help improve thin content. For the Flesh Reading Ease Score (aka readability), you should aim for around 60. For spelling and grammar errors, there shouldn’t be any. And for word count, this depends on the content. 

Manually 

If you have a small website, you can also do it manually via a content audit. This may take longer. However, it’ll actually provide the best results. 

Just go through each page and see whether it’s considered thin content. If it is, fix it. Simple as that. 

Fixing Thin Content 

There are many ways to fix thin content. The way you fix it depends on the way it’s considered thin content. Here are some ideas: 

1. Improve the Content 

If you’ve looked at the content and decided it’s thin because it doesn’t fulfil the searcher's intent, you can improve the content. 

You can improve the content in several ways: 

• Expanding on the topic 
• Answering the user intent 
• Updating outdated information 
• Using visuals 
• Creating case studies 

The list can go on and on. However, the overall goal for this fix is to make the content better and more user-intentive. 

2. Consolidate Content 

Maybe you’ve found several thin pages that are related to each other. In that case, you can actually consolidate all the thin pages into one large asset. 

For example, let’s say you have a few thin pages such as “Can cats drink milk?”, “Can cats eat fruit?”, “Can cats eat beef?”, etc. If they’re all thin pages, consolidate them into one big asset: “XX Things Cats Can Eat & Drink”. 

3. 301 Redirect It 

If your thin page has traffic, backlinks, and internal links, and you want to get rid of it, before doing so, 301 redirect it to another relevant page. It’ll pass on the authority without completely getting rid of it. 

4. Refocus Content 

Perhaps the content you’ve written doesn’t quite fulfil the user intent. In that case, refocus it. It may be faster than creating another asset to target the keyword. Plus, if it already has some traffic and backlinks, it’ll perform better. 

5. Repurpose Content 

If you’ve written content that’s considered thin, doesn’t have much traffic, and is valuable, repurpose it. Don’t get rid of it; you worked hard to create it. Recreate it into something else, like an infographic, a training module, a case study, etc. 

6. Delete It If Necessary 

Lastly, if your web page is thin and has no traffic, internal links, or backlinks, you can get rid of it. This should be your last resort. However, it’s necessary if it’s not performing at all, as it’s just wasting your crawl budget and server capacity. 

Thin content FAQ

What is thin content?

Thin content is a page that adds little or no value for the person who searched for it. It is usually too short to cover the topic, too generic to be useful, or a near-duplicate of content that already exists. Google’s helpful content systems demote it, and AI search engines do not cite it.

How many words is thin content?

There is no fixed word count. Length is not a ranking factor, but coverage is, and very short pages rarely cover a topic fully. A 200-word page can be thin and a 2,000-word page can be thin if it pads without adding value. Judge it on whether it answers the searcher’s question better than the pages already ranking, not on word count.

What are examples of thin content?

Common examples: manufacturer product blurbs copied across hundreds of SKUs, doorway and location pages built from one template, scraped or spun articles, auto-generated tag and author archive pages, and AI-written posts with no first-hand experience or original data.

Is AI content thin content?

Not automatically. AI-assisted content is fine when a human adds real substance: data, examples, first-hand experience, and a point of view. AI content becomes thin when it is published raw, full of filler phrases and generic claims that any competitor could have written.

Final Word

After reading the above, you should have a better understanding of thin pages. As you can see, they can cause some issues in SEO performance. 

Luckily, identifying and fixing thin pages is pretty easy. It can take time, depending on the severity, but it isn’t difficult to fix. 

That being said, take a look at your website. Perform an audit, find thin pages, and start fixing them. You’ll be surprised by the results.