Thin content: what it is and how audits measure it
Thin content is a page with too little substance to be useful. Google has no preferred word count, so squirrelscan measures length and the site's own norm.
Thin content is a page with too little substance to be useful to the person who lands on it: a stub, a near-empty template, or a page that exists for navigation rather than to answer anything.
There is no official word count behind the term. Google’s guide to helpful content asks site owners whether they are writing to a word count because they heard Google prefers one, and answers in brackets: “No, we don’t.” What the guide asks instead is whether a page gives a complete answer, or leaves the reader needing to search again. Word count is a proxy for that, a useful but rough one.
Category: Content
Why it matters
A thin page disappoints the reader who arrives from search, and a site with many of them is harder to trust as a whole. The causes are usually structural. A CMS creates a page per tag or location with nothing on it, a product range shares one paragraph, or a migration leaves stubs behind. Length on its own is the wrong target, though. A category listing, a contact page or a short definition can be complete at 150 words, and padding a page to a number makes it worse.
How squirrelscan checks it
Two rules approach it from different sides, and at the defaults they never both warn on the same page. content/word-count warns on a page under 300 words, notes one under 500 at info level, and both thresholds are configurable. content/thin-vs-site-norm compares each page with others of the same page type on the same site. It needs at least 10 crawled pages and 8 pages of a type with a clear norm, and flags a page only when it is under half the median for its type and well below the spread of that group. So a 400-word article on a site whose articles run 1,800 words is reported, while a 400-word product page among 300-word product pages is not. Pages under 300 words are left to the first rule.
The word count rule skips noindexed pages on a site that is itself indexed, since login and sign-up pages are short by design.
| Rule | What it flags | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Thin content: the 300 word floor and what to do below it | A page under a few hundred words rarely answers the question it ranks for. squirrel counts the words and reports against two thresholds. | warning |
| Thin against your own site: outliers by page type | A 200 word product page is normal and a 200 word article is not. squirrel compares each page against the median for its own page type. | warning |
How to fix it
Decide what each flagged page is for. Then expand it, merge it into a fuller page and redirect, or take it out of search:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />Expand a page to answer the question it exists for, at the depth its siblings have (the word count fix, the site norm fix). Merge thin pages on one topic into one good page with a 301 from the others. Use noindex for a page that only exists for navigation. A listing page that is short on purpose is better excluded than padded.
Run the check
squirrel audit https://example.com --rule-include content/word-count,content/thin-vs-site-normA signed-out local audit costs nothing.
Related terms
- Duplicate content: The same or near-identical content reachable at more than one URL, or repeated titles and descriptions across pages.
- E-E-A-T: Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google’s quality raters are told to assess, with trust at the centre.
- Content gap analysis: Finding the topics and queries a site’s audience searches for that the site does not yet cover. The related rules are disabled and do not run.