What Is Thin Content and How Much Do You Need to Rank?
Thin content is any page with too little substance to help a searcher, which in practice means pages under about 300 words with no unique value. It fails 27% of the audits run on InRankSEO. The word count is a symptom, not the definition: a 250 word answer that fully solves the question is fine, while a 600 word page that repeats itself is still thin.
How to spot thin content on your site
Look for short product pages, tag archives, old announcements and placeholder pages. These dilute your site's average quality and waste crawl budget.
How to fix it
Expand pages that deserve traffic with genuinely new sections, questions and specifics. Merge or redirect pages that do not. Delete nothing without a redirect, use the Redirect Map Generator to map old URLs to the merged page.
Check your pages free
Run any draft through the Content Quality Review before publishing, and the On-Page SEO Checker to see if your live pages pass the content depth check.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 300 words a ranking threshold?
No. It is a useful signal that a page may lack substance. Completeness beats word count.
Can thin content hurt my whole site?
Yes, many thin pages waste crawl budget and lower your site's average quality.
Related reading
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