466 of 812 pages were thin. The fix was not to rewrite 466 pages.

Two audits, two sites, same finding.

One had 466 of 812 indexable pages classed as thin. Fifty-seven per cent. The other had 93 of 189. Forty-nine per cent.

Different businesses, different platforms, different catalogue sizes. In both cases roughly half of everything the site had in the index was a page nobody would choose to land on.

That is a normal result. I do not think I have ever audited a catalogue site and found the number to be small.

What “thin” means, and what it does not

A thin page is one that does not have enough on it to be the best answer to anything. Not a word count. A page can be four hundred words and perfectly adequate, and eight hundred words of padding is still thin.

Google’s own framing supports that. Where the spam policies address this, under scaled content abuse, the definition is “many pages generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users”, explicitly including stitching content together from other pages and generating pages that add no value “no matter how it’s created.” Read what is absent from that: any number. Not a word count, not a minimum, not a ratio. The test is whether the page adds something, and 466 short pages that each genuinely answered something would not be in scope at all.

Two things it does not mean, and both matter because both cause people to do expensive and unnecessary work.

It does not mean the page is penalised. Thin pages mostly just fail to rank. That is a lost opportunity rather than an active harm, and the distinction changes the maths on whether it is worth fixing.

It does not mean every one of them needs prose. This is the assumption I spend the most time arguing with, and it is what makes the finding feel unfixable. Told that 466 pages are thin, an owner hears “write 466 descriptions”, quite reasonably concludes that is not happening, and does nothing at all.

Three questions before anyone writes anything

The 466 is not a to-do list. It is a starting point for triage, and the triage is three questions.

Should this page exist?

A large share of thin pages should not be in the index at all. Tag pages, filtered variants, empty categories, paginated series, discontinued products with no replacement. On the site with 466, a substantial fraction were pages that existed because the platform generated them, not because anyone wanted them.

Deleting or noindexing a thin page is a complete fix and it takes seconds. Do this pass first, because it usually removes the majority and it costs nothing.

Does this page get any impressions?

Search Console will tell you which of the survivors Google is already showing to somebody. A thin page picking up impressions is a page with demand and an inadequate response. That is the highest-return writing you will ever do, because you are not gambling on whether anyone wants it. You know they do.

A thin page with no impressions in twelve months is a page nobody is looking for. Improving it is speculative.

Is it a page you sell from?

Category and collection pages are usually worth more than individual products, because they catch the broader query and because one of them serves many products. If you only fix twenty pages, fix twenty collection pages.

After those three questions the 466 is usually a list of thirty or forty pages that genuinely warrant work. That is a project somebody can actually do.

The manufacturer description question

The specific version of this on product pages: should you rewrite the descriptions the manufacturer gave you?

The received answer is yes, always, because duplicate content. I do not think that is right, and I have seen the “yes always” answer waste a great deal of money.

What actually happens with a manufacturer description is that you are one of several hundred retailers publishing identical text. Google is not going to penalise you for it. It will simply have no reason to prefer your page, so you will rank on everything else: your authority, your reviews, your price, your delivery terms, your internal linking.

Which means the question is not “is this duplicated” but “is there any version of this page that could win?”

For a commodity product sold by four hundred retailers at the same price, probably not, and rewriting the description will not change that. Leave it. Spend the effort on the category page above it.

For a product where you have something to add, because you stock it, you have used it, you know which of the four variants people regret buying, and you have fitting notes for the vehicle it goes on, then yes, and the win comes from the added information rather than from the text being unique.

Uniqueness is a by-product of having something to say. It is not the goal, and pursuing it directly produces spun descriptions that are unique and still worthless.

What I would do with 466 thin pages

1. Count them properly and split by template. Products, collections, tags, blog, paginated. The distribution tells you what kind of problem it is before you look at a single page.
2. Remove or noindex everything that should not exist. Usually the largest bucket.
3. Cross-reference the survivors against Search Console impressions. Sort descending.
4. Do the collection pages first, then the products with demand.
5. Leave the long tail alone, and stop treating it as debt. A commodity product page that nobody searches for is not costing you anything by being brief.

That turns an unfixable-sounding number into about a fortnight of work with a defensible order to it.

The short version

If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Ecommerce SEO covers category and product architecture at scale, and Shopify SEO covers the platform defaults that generate a lot of these pages in the first place.