Thin Content: Why BearAudit Flags Pages Under 300 Words
Search engines prefer pages with enough substance. Learn why BearAudit checks word count, what to do when pages are flagged, and when to ignore the warning. Use the content filter to find thin pages.
BearAudit marks a page as thin content when the main text has fewer than 300 words. It's a warning, not a hard rule—but it's worth paying attention to.
Why word count matters
- Quality signal — Very short pages often don't answer a query well. Google's guidelines favor helpful, substantive content.
- Cannibalization — If many pages say almost nothing, you may be diluting your own rankings instead of having a few strong pages.
- Crawl budget — For large sites, thin or low-value pages can use up crawl budget that could go to more important URLs.
300 words is a practical minimum many SEOs use. It doesn't guarantee a good page, but it's a simple check that catches obviously underdeveloped content.
What to do when BearAudit flags thin content
- Expand the page — Add useful detail, examples, or a clear answer to the intent behind the URL.
- Merge or remove — If the page doesn't deserve to rank, consider merging it into a stronger page or noindexing/removing it.
- Leave it — Some pages (e.g. contact, legal) may be short by design. You can ignore the warning if the page has a clear purpose and isn't meant to rank for competitive terms.
Use BearAudit's content category filter to list all thin-content pages, then decide case by case. The dashboard also shows average words per page for the whole site, so you can see if thin content is a site-wide pattern or just a few outliers.
For a short definition, see What is thin content? in our glossary.