What is thin content?
Thin content is a page that exists to be indexed rather than to be read. Google's test is purpose and added value, not word count.
The word-count framing is a misreading. A hundred-word page answering one question precisely is not thin; a two-thousand-word page assembled from what is already on ten other pages is. Google's scaled content abuse policy names the actual test: unoriginal content that provides little or no value, no matter how it is created.
The failure mode that catches data-driven sites is templating. If a set of pages differ only in a variable substituted into the same sentences, they are substantially similar regardless of how real the underlying data is. The test worth applying before publishing at scale: does each page contain at least one fact that appears nowhere else, and would a reader who saw two of them feel they had read two things?
Related
- IndexationIndexation is whether a search engine has stored your page and is willing to return it. Being crawled is not the same as being indexed, and being indexed is not the same as ranking.
- Crawl budgetCrawl budget is how much crawling a search engine is willing to spend on your site. On a new or low-authority domain it is small, which is why publishing more pages can reduce how many get indexed.
- Programmatic SEOProgrammatic SEO is generating many pages from a dataset and a template, one per entity, to capture long-tail queries that share a shape.
Want to know where you actually stand on this? Run a free visibility check or try the free tools.