The verdict
Thin content turned up in ten of the last eleven audits I wrote, at wildly different word counts. A 300-word contact page is correct. A 300-word service page is not. A 1,400-word service page can be thinner than either. The number is not the test, and treating it as one is how sites get padded rather than fixed.
Ten of the last eleven audits I wrote flagged thin content. The word counts on the pages I flagged ranged from about 180 to just over 1,400.
That range is the whole point. If thin meant short, the flagged pages would cluster at the bottom.
What thin actually means
A page is thin when it does not finish the job it exists to do. That is a question about purpose, and you cannot answer it by counting.
Google’s guidance on people-first content asks whether your content leaves readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources. That is the usable test. Read the page as somebody with the problem it is about, and ask whether you would now go back to Google.
The three shapes it takes
What I am actually flagging
- Short and unfinished. A service page that names the treatment, says it is effective, and stops. This is the one people picture, and it is the least common of the three.
- Long and empty. 1,400 words about the philosophy of the technique, the history of the profession, and how much the practitioner cares. Nothing about what happens in the room, how long it takes, or what it costs.
- Correct but duplicated. Eight location pages that are the same 700 words with the town swapped. Each one reads fine alone. Together they are one page that has been printed eight times.
The second shape is the one that survives audits, because it clears every word-count threshold anyone has set.
The page where 300 words is right
Contact. Its job is to get somebody to phone, email or find the door. It does that in a few hundred words and everything else you add makes it worse.
I have sent 1,100-word contact pages back and 280-word ones through in the same audit. Somebody looking at a word-count column would have had that exactly backwards.
Why the distinction matters commercially
Because “thin” as a word-count finding produces padding, and padding is a policy problem rather than a quality one.
Google’s spam policies describe scaled content abuse as generating many pages of largely unoriginal content that provides little to no value, no matter how it is created. Nobody sets out to do that. They get told their pages are thin, they add 500 words to each of forty pages, and they arrive there anyway.
My note: when I flag thin content I try to say what the page failed to answer rather than what it should weigh. “This page does not say what happens at the first appointment” is actionable. “This page is 420 words” invites the wrong fix.
How to test it in two minutes
Take the page and write down the three questions a person with that problem would arrive with. Then read the page and mark which ones it answers.
If it answers none of them and runs to 1,200 words, it is thin. If it answers all three in 400, it is finished. This is a slower test than a word count and it is the only one that has ever changed what a practice did next.
The floors I do enforce are in how long a clinic page has to be, and they exist as a prompt to go and find more out, not as the definition of adequate.
The short version
- Thin content in ten of eleven audits, at word counts from 180 to 1,400.
- Thin means the page did not finish its job, not that it is short.
- Three shapes: short and unfinished, long and empty, correct but duplicated.
- Long and empty is the one that passes every threshold.
- A 300-word contact page is correct. A 1,100-word one is not.
- Word-count findings produce padding, which is a worse problem than the one you started with.
- Test it by writing the three questions first, then marking what the page answers.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where each page gets read against what it was supposed to answer.
