Thin Content

Thinness is about information, not word count. A 200-word page stating real prices and real availability is substantive; a 1,500-word page of padded generalities is thin at any length. The test worth applying: could a competitor regenerate this page in an afternoon without doing any of the underlying work? If yes, it is decoration.

The padding instinct makes it worse rather than better. Word-count targets produce introductions restating the title, definitions of terms the reader already knows, and closing sections summarising what was just said. Every one of those dilutes the page: a reader hunting for the answer has more to wade through, and a machine extracting a quotable passage has more noise around the signal. Cutting a thin 1,500-word page to a substantive 400 words usually improves both outcomes.

Two failure modes are specific to service businesses. Service pages that describe a service in terms that would apply to any provider anywhere — no prices, no timelines, no named people, no photographs of actual work. And location pages that name a city in the heading and nowhere else, which is thin content and a doorway simultaneously.

The consequences differ by channel and both are quiet. Search responds by declining to index or by ranking the page nowhere, with no notification. AI systems respond by never retrieving it, because a page with no specific claims contains nothing an assistant could safely repeat. Nobody sends a warning; the page simply does no work.

The reliable escape is proprietary substance — measurements, data, experience nobody else holds. Your prices, your timelines, your completed jobs, your results. It is why every programmatic page on this site is generated from research we ran rather than adjectives we typed.