Thin content and short pages: Crawl Audit check 187

Short answer: a page with almost no text of its own gives search engines and AI assistants nothing to work with. Check 187 fails pages with fewer than 150 words of main content. But Google's concern is pages with no original value, not short pages as such.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: 150 words or more in the main content.
• Fail: fewer. The report shows the count.

The catalogue calls it a "penalty risk". There's no automatic penalty for being short; see below.

What Google's spam policies target

• Thin affiliation: "publishing content with product affiliate links where the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant" with no original content. Google adds: "Not every site that participates in an affiliate program is a thin affiliate."
• Scaled content abuse: "when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users."
• Neither rule sets a word count. Both are about copied or mass-produced pages that add nothing.

Short versus thin

• Thin: a location page per town with only the town name swapped, a product page with the maker's copied description, a tag page listing two links.
• Short but fine: a contact page, a booking page, a calculator that does one job well.
• If a page is thin, either give it something only you can say, merge it into a stronger page, or stop it being indexed.

On devmarde.com

Our homepage had 2,942 words of main content on 6 October. It passes.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search (updated 28 August 2026), checked 6 October 2026.