Thin content is a page that offers a visitor little or nothing they could not get elsewhere: empty category pages, copied product descriptions, auto-generated text, a paragraph wrapped around an advert. Google has no minimum word count and says so. A short page that answers a question is not thin. A long page that says nothing is.
What Google's rules actually say
Google's spam policies do not have a rule called thin content. They have a rule about thin affiliation, where product descriptions and reviews are copied from the merchant without anything added, and a rule about scaled content abuse, where many pages are generated to manipulate rankings rather than help anyone. Both are about value and intent, not length.
On length, Google's own guidance is explicit: there is no magical word count target, minimum or maximum, and it asks whether you are writing to a word count because you heard Google prefers one, then answers that it does not.
So what is thin?
A page you cannot describe the purpose of in one sentence. A page that exists because a keyword tool suggested the phrase. A page whose content is the same as another page with two words changed. A page built by a template with the town name swapped in. A glossary entry that restates the term. These get crawled and not indexed, and enough of them lower Google's opinion of the whole site.
What is not thin
A sixty-word page that answers exactly the question in its title, links to the fuller explanation, and gives the reader what they came for. A price table. A specification. A definition with one good example. Google indexes and ranks such pages constantly, because they are useful. The test is whether a visitor leaves satisfied, not whether they scrolled.
What to do with it
Improve, merge or remove. If the page has a real purpose, give it the content that purpose needs. If it duplicates another, merge them and redirect. If it has no purpose, delete it and let the URL return a proper not-found status. Fewer, better pages get a site indexed more completely than many weak ones.
Sources
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Crawled, currently not indexed
Crawled, currently not indexed means Google fetched the page, read it, and decided not to include it in search results for now. It may be indexed later without you doing anything. Unlike the discovered status, this one is a judgement about the page or the site, not a queue.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is substantially the same content available at more than one URL, on your own site or across sites. There is no duplicate content penalty. What happens instead is that Google picks one version to index and folds the others into it, and if it picks the wrong one, or splits links between them, you lose some of what you have earned.
Helpful content update
The helpful content update was a Google ranking change first released in August 2022 that assessed whether a site's content was written primarily for people or primarily to rank, and applied a site-wide demotion where it judged the latter. The September 2023 version caused severe losses for many small publishers. In March 2024 Google folded the system into its core ranking systems, so it no longer exists as a separate signal.
E-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. It comes from the guidelines Google gives the human raters who evaluate search quality, not from the ranking algorithm. Google says E-E-A-T itself is not a ranking factor and that rater data is not used directly in ranking. It describes what Google's systems are trying to reward, which makes it a useful checklist and a poor thing to optimise for directly.