Thin content is one of the biggest SEO problems, damaging your rankings and domain's reputation. Content created without the necessary attention frustrates both users and search engines.
When search engines get frustrated, they adjust their algorithms to filter out poor content, causing some websites to lose rankings and traffic.
In this guide, I’ll explain what thin content is, why it’s bad for SEO, and how you can fix it to improve your website’s performance.
What Is Thin Content?
Thin content is content published solely for SEO purposes and adds no real value to the user. It's not authentic, and no special care has been taken to make it meaningful and useful to users.
Typical examples of low-quality content are auto-generated pages, doorway pages, scrapped content, keyword-stuffed pages, or pages with lines of text thrown on them without meaning or purpose.
Thin Content Is Bad For SEO
Why all the fuzz about thin content? Aren’t search engines clever enough to identify thin content and just discard it?
It’s not as simple as that.
Thin Content Reduces The Overall Quality of a Website
When Google evaluates a single webpage, it doesn’t look at it in isolation. Instead, it considers the overall quality of your website. If your site contains a mix of valuable pages and many thin, low-quality ones, it can affect your site’s credibility in Google’s eyes.
Google’s Helpful Content Update (which is now part of Google's Core Updates) prioritizes websites that consistently provide useful, people-first content. This means that if a significant portion of your site consists of thin or unhelpful pages, your rankings could suffer—not just for those weak pages but for your entire domain.
Content Is Still King, With or Without SEO
To rank high in Google, you need content that satisfies the search intent. Anything less than that will not get you anywhere close to the first page of Google, no matter what tricks you try to deceive their algorithms.
Users Don't Like Thin Content
Even if you manage to rank well with thin content, it won’t help you in the long run. Why? Because users don’t like it.
When visitors land on a page expecting useful information and instead find repetitive or low-value content, they leave. This increases bounce rate and reduces dwell time—both signals that Google uses to measure content quality.
If many users abandon your site quickly, Google will assume your content doesn’t meet their needs and adjust your rankings accordingly.
How Does Google Identify Thin Content?
Google uses various signals to determine whether a page provides real value to users. If a page fails these checks, it may be classified as thin content, which can hurt its rankings.
Here are some key factors Google looks at:
- Content Originality – Is the content unique, or is it a duplicate of another page on your site or elsewhere on the web?
- Content Formatting – Does the page have a proper structure with headings, subheadings, and clear readability?
- User Experience (UX) Factors – Does the page have excessive ads, intrusive popups, or elements that make it hard to navigate?
- Page Speed – Does the page load quickly, or is it slow, frustrating users and making them leave?
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) – Does the content demonstrate first-hand experience, subject expertise, credibility, and reliability? Google favors content created by knowledgeable sources that provide accurate, well-researched information.
Another critical factor is content created solely for SEO purposes. This means creating content to rank for specific keywords, without considering website relevance.
These pages may technically have good content, but if they don’t align with your site’s purpose or audience, they won’t add real value.
Google’s algorithms can detect such pages and penalize your site for trying to manipulate rankings with irrelevant content.
How To Fix Thin Content Issues
Let's see the most common causes of thin content and how to fix them.
1. Pages With Little or No Original Content
These are some of the easiest thin content issues to fix. You have three main options:
- Delete them, resulting in a 404 error.
- Noindex them, using a noindex tag so search engines don’t include them in their index.
- Improve them by adding valuable, original content.
Here are some common examples and the best ways to handle them:
Product Pages with No Original Content
If you run an eCommerce website selling third-party products, you might use manufacturer descriptions. The problem? Those same descriptions likely appear on dozens, if not hundreds, of other websites. Google can recognize this and devalue your pages because they offer nothing unique.
How to fix it:
- Rewrite product descriptions in your own words, adding unique insights, user reviews, or usage tips.
- Include original images, videos, or comparison tables to make the page more helpful.
- If rewriting is not an option for all products, prioritize your best-selling or highest-margin items.
If you want more ideas, check out my guide on Product Page SEO.
Pages Used for Navigation Purposes Only
Some websites have pages that exist solely to help users navigate (e.g. tag pages, or filter pages in an online store). These pages often contain very little content and may not provide enough standalone value to rank in search engines.
How to fix it:
- Add useful content to the page, such as descriptions, featured products, or FAQs.
- If a page is purely for navigation and doesn’t need to rank in search, use the noindex tag to prevent Google from indexing it.
- Remove unnecessary navigation pages from your XML sitemap to avoid wasting crawl budget.
2. Outdated Pages
If your website has been around for years, chances are you have old pages that are no longer relevant, such as product announcements, expired promotions, or outdated blog posts.
How to fix it:
- If the page no longer serves any purpose, delete it and remove it from your sitemap.
- If the page has useful backlinks or still gets traffic, set up a 301 redirect to a newer, more relevant page.
- If the content is outdated but still has potential, update it with fresh information instead of deleting it.
3. Pages With Duplicate Content
A group of pages most likely to have duplicate content on your website is your category pages.
Category pages ‘get their content’ from the posts that belong to a category, and this has nothing new to offer Google or users.
You should NOT delete or de-index them. Category pages can be very useful for SEO purposes so the only path to follow is to improve their content by:
- Optimizing their title and meta description
- Adding unique and relevant content at the top of the page
To help you understand this better, look at my category pages. They are optimized for particular terms (for example, "SEO Articles") and rank for those terms in Google, in the top positions.
The same goes for e-commerce category pages. Category pages are essential for eCommerce websites, if optimized correctly.
4. PPC Landing Pages
Landing pages or pages whose sole purpose is to be used for search engine marketing campaigns and have nothing new to offer users can be de-indexed and removed from your sitemap.
A word of caution: If your landing pages have original content, do not de-index them. I’m referring to landing pages with content copied from parts of your website or other websites on the Internet, and have nothing ‘new’ to add to your website’s content.
5. Old Pages With No Rankings or Traffic
This can be tricky. If you’re familiar with how search engines work, you know that not every published page will rank. Google has to crawl and process billions of pages, so it’s normal for many of your pages to have little or no visibility in search results.
However, remember that ranking takes time before deciding which pages to fix. A page published less than six months ago may still be in Google’s evaluation phase, meaning its true ranking position hasn’t been fully established.
For older pages (6+ months) that have no rankings or traffic, it’s time to take action. Here is a step-by-step process to follow:
Step 1: Check if the page has any rankings.
- Use Google Search Console to see if the page is ranking for any keywords.
- If the page appears on the second or third page of search results, it has potential.
Step 2: If the page has some rankings, optimize it.
- Identify the keywords it ranks for and optimize the content accordingly.
- Update the title tag and headings to better align with those keywords.
- Expand or improve the content by adding missing details, examples, or more content.
- Make sure the page follows on-page SEO best practices (internal linking, meta descriptions, structured data, etc.).
Step 3: If the page has no rankings, assess its value.
- As mentioned above, not all pages will rank in Google, and that’s okay. Some content serves other purposes, like engaging your audience, supporting internal links, or providing useful information for existing visitors.
- Keep the page if it’s valuable. If the content is original, unique, and aligns with your website’s topics, there’s no need to delete it. Instead, improve it by making it more comprehensive, updating outdated information, or enhancing the user experience.
- If the page isn’t valuable, decide between merging and redirecting it (301 redirect) with a related page, no-indexing it, or removing it.
6. Pages With a High Bounce Rate (Proactive Measure)
This is a special category of pages and although they are not considered now as ‘thin content’ pages, it’s good to be proactive and fix the issue before Google decides to lower their rankings.
Go to your Google Analytics account and view the Landing Pages report (Life Cycle > Engagement). Then, sort the pages by Average Engagement Time Per Session and find the ones with a low engagement rate.
When a page has a low engagement rate, it means that users did not find what they were looking for, or did not like the page content, and left without visiting a second page from your page.
If users return to Google right away and click on another result, this is a negative signal known as “pogo-sticking.” Google can detect this behavior, and if it happens frequently, the page’s rankings may gradually decline.
In this case, the only solution is to improve the page content and ensure it matches the user intent. Give users exactly what is promised in the page's title and description.
Conclusion
Thin content pages are bad for SEO. As an SEO, you are responsible for reviewing your content to find and fix thin content pages.
The content audit process is time-consuming (especially for websites with many pages), but it is necessary for a website's overall SEO healthiness.
Start by identifying which pages need to be handled. Then, decide the best course of action for each page: improving it, removing it, or redirecting it to other related pages.
Keep track of your changes, and always remember that it’s better to have a website with 100 top-quality pages than a website with 1000 low-quality pages.
Finally, don’t forget that prevention is always better than cure. In this context it means two things:
First, improve any pages likely to be considered thin content and be a step ahead of Google.
Second, be more careful in the future and only publish high-quality content on your website so that you don’t have to review and improve thin content pages, which can be time-consuming.
