SEO finding
The page is empty, thin or has no running text
SEO Warning Severity: Medium
Part of the audit Thin and placeholder content. Finding id: seo.thinContent.
What it costs you
A page with little or no content of its own rarely ranks, and many of them make search engines trust the whole site less.
What to do
Finish the page, merge it into a fuller page, or take it out of the index.
What it checks
- Very little text on the page
- No paragraphs of text
- Page has no content
How to fix it
Fill the empty page or stop serving it
- Open [url] and compare what you see with what the crawl saw. Content that appears only after a click or a login is not there for a crawler.
- If the content is missing for everyone, look for the cause: an item that was unpublished, a list whose query returns nothing, a script error.
- If the page has nothing to show for good, let the address answer 404, or redirect it to the closest page.
How to check: Recrawl the page: the main content has words, or the address no longer answers 200.
Decide per page, or per template
- Check the template_id: thin pages of one template (tags, empty categories, search results) are best handled together.
- If the page should rank, write the content it lacks.
- If it has no use for searchers, set it to noindex or remove it and redirect its URL to the closest page.
How to check: Recrawl the site and run this rule again.
A real case
A large UK home-service site received Google's manual action 'Thin content with little or no added value', although the owner said its content was unique and had cost hundreds of thousands. The owner asked on a forum whether the site could recover.
Thresholds
| Name | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
min_main_words | 150 | Fewer words than this in the main content is reported as thin. Words in navigation, header and footer are not counted. Set it per site: a contact page or a product list needs fewer words than an article. |
min_paragraph_words | 20 | A page whose longest passage of running text in the main content has fewer words than this counts as having no paragraphs. |