The fix, in one snippet
location = /tags/running-shoes { return 301 /guides/running-shoes; }Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
We strip scripts, styles and markup from each page, count the remaining words, and report pages under 250 words. The count is of visible body text, so navigation and footer boilerplate inflate it rather than the reverse: a page reported at 180 words usually has considerably less of its own.
Word count is a proxy, not a standard. A contact page, a login page or a well-made pricing table can be excellent at 80 words. The finding is a prompt to look, not a verdict.
Why it matters
Google's guidance on helpful content is explicit that pages should leave a reader feeling they have learnt enough to accomplish their goal. Thin pages usually fail that test not because of length but because of what the length reveals: the subject was never actually covered.
Thin pages also tend to arrive in bulk, from templates that generate one page per tag, location or filter combination. At scale that pattern is what the spam policies call scaled content abuse, and the risk moves from the individual page to the site.
How to fix it
For each thin page, pick one of three outcomes and apply it deliberately.
Expand it where the subject deserves a page: answer the question the title implies, add the specifics only you have, and cut nothing to hit a length.
Merge it where several thin pages cover facets of one subject. Combine them into one page that covers it properly and redirect the others:
location = /tags/running-shoes { return 301 /guides/running-shoes; }Remove it from the index where the page exists for a functional reason. A cart or a thank-you page should be noindex, follow rather than padded with text nobody reads.
Where this fits
Thin content is check 6 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Meta description missing (medium), where the meta description is the snippet under the headline. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Thin content closes one route in. Immediately below it: Title length outside the useful range, where titles are truncated in search results at roughly 600 pixels; Duplicate meta descriptions, where the same description on many pages tells a searcher nothing about which one to open; Heading levels skipped, where heading levels should descend one at a time.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Thin content (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-thin-contentThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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