Thin pages
Pages with very little text give search engines almost nothing to rank and visitors almost nothing to read. Silktide measures the amount of text on each page and reports pages that are "thin".
A thin page is one with fewer than 300 words that also lacks significant non-text content, such as a large image or an embedded map. 300 words is the widely used estimate of what search engines treat as thin content.
Why this matters
Search engines rank pages on the substance of their content. A page with a heading and two sentences rarely answers anyone's query, so it rarely ranks - and a site with many such pages can look low-quality as a whole, dragging down stronger pages with it.
Thin pages are usually one of two things: a placeholder that was never finished, or a topic split too finely across many small pages that would compete better as one substantial page.
How to fix it
- Expand pages that deserve to exist: answer the questions a visitor on that page actually has, in genuine depth rather than padded prose.
- Merge clusters of small related pages into one substantial page, and redirect the old URLs to it.
- Delete placeholder pages that serve no purpose, redirecting their URLs if anything links to them.
- Some pages are legitimately light on text - a "please wait" screen, a page that exists to show a video or a map. those findings.
How Silktide tests this
- Count the words of visible text on each page. The word count is shown with the finding, and your site's average word count per page is tracked over time.
- Skip the site's 404 page, which does not need content.
- Pass pages with 300 or more words.
- For pages under 300 words, pass them anyway when they contain significant non-text content - an image larger than roughly 600 by 400 pixels, or an embedded map - since such pages are usually intentional.
- Flag the remaining pages as thin.
Troubleshooting
A page full of video or interactive content is flagged
Silktide can recognise large images and embedded maps as significant content, but not every kind of embed. If the page is intentionally text-light, ignore the finding - and consider adding a paragraph of supporting text anyway, since search engines cannot watch your video either.