Warning Content
Thin content (under 200 words)
- Severity
- Warning
- Impact
- Medium
- Effort to fix
- High
- Issue code
thin_content
Why it matters
Pages with very little text rarely satisfy search intent and may be treated as low value.
How to fix it
Expand the page with useful, original content or consolidate it into a stronger related page.
What this means
The page is indexable and has fewer than 200 words of visible text. The evidence shows the exact count.
The count includes all visible text in the page body, including menus and footers, so a page flagged here has very little content of its own. Pages that are not indexable, such as noindex or canonicalised pages, are not flagged.
Is a short page a problem?
Word count is a screening tool, not a quality score. Google does not reward length, and a short page can be exactly right:
- Usually fine: contact pages, short product pages with images and specifications, login pages, store locators, simple calculators.
- Worth a look: blog posts and articles under 200 words, category pages that only list products, tag and archive pages, location pages that differ only by city name, and pages created in bulk from a template.
What hurts is many indexable pages that add nothing a visitor cannot find elsewhere on the site or on other sites. Google's helpful content systems evaluate a site as a whole, so a large number of weak pages can affect how the rest is seen.
How to decide what to do
For each flagged page, ask whether a visitor searching for its topic would be satisfied:
| Situation | Action |
|---|---|
| The page answers its question well in few words | Leave it |
| The topic deserves more | Expand it with real substance: examples, data, steps, images with context |
| Another page covers the same topic better | Merge them and 301 redirect the weaker page |
| The page exists only for navigation or filtering | Add a short, useful introduction, or set it to noindex |
| The page has no purpose | Remove it (404 or 410) or redirect it |
Avoid padding pages with filler to pass a word count. It does not help visitors or rankings.
Verify the fix
The Content view in Pages lists word counts for every page, with a filter for thin pages. Recrawl after changes and compare, and check Near-duplicate content for templated pages that are short and similar at the same time.
How it affects your score
Finding this issue on any page costs the Content score 3 points, plus up to 12 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. Weakens rankings, crawling or measurement. Fix after critical issues.
Find the affected URLs
Open Crawl > Issues and pick Thin content (under 200 words). Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (medium) and effort (high), and in the issues CSV under the code thin_content. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.