Definition
Thin content is content that offers the visitor little or no value: pages with a few sentences and nothing else, automatically generated or copied text, rewritten versions of what already exists elsewhere, affiliate pages without an opinion of their own, and doorway pages that exist only to rank for a keyword variant. It is not about word count, but about whether the page adds anything to what is already available.
Google names thin content explicitly in its spam policies and targets it through core updates, the Helpful Content system (part of the core algorithms since 2023) and the policy against scaled content abuse from March 2024, which addresses mass production of pages without value, regardless of whether they were made by people or AI. The effect is often site-wide: a large share of thin pages drags down the assessment of the whole site, including the good pages.
Real-world examples: a webshop with thousands of product pages showing only the manufacturer's text; tag pages and archives in a blog containing a single article; 'SEO {city}' pages that only swap the place name; three-line news items; and AI-generated articles that summarise a subject without original data, examples or a position. Since language models made text cheap, that last category is the fastest growing.
You recognise thin content in Search Console by pages with the status 'Crawled - currently not indexed' and by pages that are indexed but receive no impressions in a year. A crawl with word count and duplication percentage per page helps map the volume. Combine that with analytics to see which thin pages still have visitors; those deserve expansion rather than removal.
The fix is per page: expand with real information (specifications, your own photos, experiences, comparisons, answers to the questions customers ask), merge with a stronger page via a redirect, set to noindex if the page is useful for visitors but not for search engines, or remove. Traze does not write a page without a demonstrable question and original content, and flags existing thin pages in the content audit with a recommendation: expand, merge or remove.