Free Thin Content Audit: How to Find Pages Hurting Your Rankings

What Counts as Thin Content

There's no magic number, but here's a practical breakdown:

• •Under 100 words: critical. These pages have almost no content for Google to index. They're either placeholders you forgot about or pages that need a complete rewrite.
• •100 to 300 words: thin. Not enough depth for most topics. If a competitor's page on the same subject has 1,500 words of helpful content, your 200-word version isn't winning that ranking.
• •300 to 500 words: borderline. Could be fine for simple pages like contact or about pages. For blog posts or product pages targeting competitive keywords, you probably need more.
• •500+ words: generally OK. Word count alone doesn't make content good, but it's a baseline signal that there's enough substance for Google to evaluate.

It's Not Just About Word Count

Before you go adding filler paragraphs to every short page, here's the thing: word count is a signal, not the whole picture. A 300-word page that directly answers a specific question can outrank a 2,000-word page stuffed with fluff. Google cares about whether the content is useful, not whether it hits an arbitrary length.

That said, most thin pages aren't short because they're concise. They're short because someone didn't finish writing them or because the page was auto-generated without any real content. That's the stuff you need to find and fix.

Other red flags that usually go hand-in-hand with thin content:

• •Missing H1 tags. If the page doesn't even have a main heading, it probably wasn't built with content in mind.
• •No meta description. Google will generate one, but it's usually garbage. Missing metas often signal a page that got no editorial attention.
• •Zero headings. A page with no H2s or H3s is just a wall of text (or barely any text at all). Structure matters for both users and crawlers.

How to Run the Audit

You could do this manually. Open every page on your site, check the word count, and log it in a spreadsheet. For a 20-page site, that's doable in an hour. For anything bigger, it's a waste of time.

I built the Thin Content Detector to handle this automatically. You paste in your domain, it finds your sitemap, crawls up to 200 pages, and gives you a sortable table showing word count, severity rating, H1 status, meta description status, and heading count for every page. The whole thing takes about a minute.

It also strips out navigation, footers, sidebars, and e-commerce widgets before counting words. That matters because a lot of audit tools count boilerplate text and make your pages look healthier than they are. If your product page has 50 words of actual content and 300 words of "You might also like" recommendations, the real word count is 50.

What to Do With the Results

Once you have the list, don't just start adding words to every short page. The fix depends on the page type and whether it has any value at all.

• •Expand pages that target real keywords. If a thin blog post is ranking on page two or three for a term you care about, beef it up. Add sections, answer related questions, include examples. This is the highest-ROI move because the page already has some authority.
• •Merge pages covering the same topic. Two thin posts about similar subjects? Combine them into one strong piece and redirect the old URL. You consolidate authority instead of splitting it.
• •Delete or noindex pages with no purpose. Tag pages, empty category pages, and test posts with no traffic and no backlinks? Kill them. They're dead weight. Add a noindex tag or 301 redirect to a relevant page.
• •Leave short pages alone if they work. Your contact page probably doesn't need 800 words. If a short page serves its purpose and isn't targeting a competitive keyword, it's fine.

Prioritize by Impact

Start with the critical pages (under 100 words) because those are almost always problems. Then work through the thin pages, focusing on ones that target keywords you actually want to rank for.

Check Google Search Console to see which thin pages still get impressions. If Google is showing a page in search results but nobody clicks because the content is weak, that's a page worth fixing. High impressions plus low clicks on a thin page is basically Google saying "I want to rank this but the content isn't good enough."

I keep this as a recurring process, not a one-time fix. Every month or two, I run the audit again to catch new thin pages that have crept in. Product pages get added without descriptions. New blog drafts get published too early. It happens. Having a quick way to spot the problem means it never gets out of hand.