[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":30},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-body-thin-content-cleanup-en":3},{"content":4,"toc":5},"\u003Cp>Every site accumulates pages that should not exist. A product variant nobody sells any more, three blog posts that say the same thing, a landing page written for a campaign that ended eighteen months ago. None of them is broken. All of them compete with the pages you actually want people to find.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>This is not a hygiene exercise you do once. It is a monthly twenty-minute pass, and the hard part is not finding the pages — it is deciding what to do with each one. Deleting is one option and usually the wrong one; the useful decisions are consolidate, rewrite, or leave alone.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"what-thin-actually-means\">What thin actually means\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>Thin content is not short content. A two-hundred-word page that answers a specific question completely is not thin. A three-thousand-word page that restates the same point in six ways, adds no specifics, and could have been written from the title alone is thin, regardless of length.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>The workable definition is about what the page contributes: does it contain something the reader could not have guessed, or does it only contain what they already knew? By that standard, thinness is a property of the content, not of the word count — and it is why padding a page never fixes the problem it was meant to fix.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"thin-is-relative-to-intent\">Thin is relative to intent\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>The same page can be adequate for one query and worthless for another. Someone searching for a definition wants two clear paragraphs. Someone searching for how to do something wants the steps and the failure cases. A page that gives the definition when the query demands the steps is thin for that query even though it is a reasonable page.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>This is why the useful question is never \"is this page good.\" It is \"which query is this page supposed to satisfy, and does it fully satisfy that one?\" Pages fail this test in two directions: they cover too little for the intent they target, or they target an intent nobody has, which is a different problem — not thinness, but unreachability.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"four-signals-worth-checking\">Four signals worth checking\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>Sort your pages by these four signals and the candidates surface quickly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cul>\n  \u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Pages with impressions and no clicks over several months.\u003C\u002Fstrong> The page is being shown, which means search engines think it is relevant; readers disagree. That gap is the most efficient place to spend effort.\u003C\u002Fli>\n  \u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Groups of pages targeting the same query.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Two or three near-identical pages split whatever authority and attention either would have had alone.\u003C\u002Fli>\n  \u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Pages with one internal link.\u003C\u002Fstrong> A page nobody links to is a page you stopped believing in. Sometimes the link structure is the whole problem.\u003C\u002Fli>\n  \u003Cli>\u003Cstrong>Pages that only exist because a template generated them.\u003C\u002Fstrong> Faceted product listings, empty category pages, author archives with one post. These are the largest category on most sites and the least defensible.\u003C\u002Fli>\n\u003C\u002Ful>\n\n\u003Cp>Check the last one first. It is usually the biggest win and the least emotionally difficult, because nobody wrote those pages on purpose.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"the-consolidation-decision\">The consolidation decision\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>When two pages target the same intent, the choice is between merging and differentiating. Merge when the content genuinely belongs together: combine the useful sections into the stronger page, and redirect the weaker one. Differentiate when the pages serve genuinely different readers, and rewrite both so that a reader can tell which one is for them within the first two sentences.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>Make the decision on evidence, not seniority. If the weaker page has the better title, you are merging into the title and keeping the body. If the stronger page ranks for the query but converts badly, the problem may be the page rather than its competition, and merging will not fix it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>Keep a record of what was merged where. In six months, someone will ask why a URL redirects, and the answer should not require archaeology.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"improving-instead-of-deleting\">Improving instead of deleting\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>Most thin pages should be improved rather than removed, because the page already has history, sometimes links, and a place in the site's structure. Adding the missing material is often a thirty-minute job: a worked example, the failure cases, the specifics you left out the first time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>The test is whether you can add something real. If you cannot think of any information the page could contain that a reader would value, you are looking at a page that should not be improved, and the honest move is consolidation or removal rather than more words. Adding adjectives to a page with nothing to say produces a longer thin page, which is strictly worse than a short one, because it costs the reader more time to discover the same absence.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"redirects-and-removals\">Redirects and removals\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>When a page goes away, redirect it to the closest equivalent that is genuinely equivalent. Redirecting unrelated pages to the homepage is worse than returning a 404, because it wastes the visitor's time and tells search engines something untrue about your site's structure.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>If there is no equivalent, let it 404. A clean 404 is an honest answer, and search engines handle it correctly. The pages to redirect carefully are those with incoming links from other sites, because that link equity should land somewhere relevant. The pages to just remove are templated pages nobody ever linked to.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>If many pages in a group are being removed, decide the group's fate once and apply it. Removing four hundred faceted URLs one at a time will not happen; deciding that the whole facet is no longer indexable is a single change that actually gets made.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"working-through-a-site-at-scale\">Working through a site at scale\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>Export your pages with impressions, clicks, internal link counts and last-modified date. Sort by impressions with zero or near-zero clicks. Work top down, and time-box the whole session.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>Do not attempt a full-site audit. Ten pages a month, chosen by signal rather than by which ones annoy you, will out-perform one heroic pass that produces a spreadsheet and no changes. The reason is not discipline; it is that decisions about consolidation need judgement, and judgement runs out after about ten pages.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>Keep a running list of decisions you have made and pages you have deferred. Deferred pages are not failures — they are the queue for next month, and having them written down is what stops the same ten pages being re-evaluated forever.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Ch2 id=\"a-monthly-rule\">A monthly rule\u003C\u002Fh2>\n\n\u003Cp>Once a month, pick the ten pages with the worst ratio of impressions to clicks, and for each one write a single sentence answering: what question was this page supposed to answer, and does it answer it? That sentence determines the action — improve, merge, redirect, or leave — and it takes about fifteen minutes for ten pages.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\n\u003Cp>The pages that survive this test unchanged are the ones you were right about. The ones that do not survive it are the reason the pass is worth repeating, because a site left unattended does not stay at the same quality. It loses it, one unpublished campaign page at a time.\u003C\u002Fp>",[6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27],{"id":7,"text":8},"what-thin-actually-means","What thin actually means",{"id":10,"text":11},"thin-is-relative-to-intent","Thin is relative to intent",{"id":13,"text":14},"four-signals-worth-checking","Four signals worth checking",{"id":16,"text":17},"the-consolidation-decision","The consolidation decision",{"id":19,"text":20},"improving-instead-of-deleting","Improving instead of deleting",{"id":22,"text":23},"redirects-and-removals","Redirects and removals",{"id":25,"text":26},"working-through-a-site-at-scale","Working through a site at scale",{"id":28,"text":29},"a-monthly-rule","A monthly rule",1791511468509]