Why it matters
Thin pages have little text of their own. They are often pages generated from a template, such as empty listings, tag pages or city pages with one line that changes. Google tends to crawl them and then leave them out, reporting "Crawled - currently not indexed" or "soft 404".
The fix is either to give each page real, unique content, or to stop asking search engines to index the weak ones.
Before you start
- A site scan or site report that lists the thin pages
- Access to edit the template or content of those pages
Step by step
- 1
Find them
Open your report and choose the Thin content problem.
Your site›Why pages aren't indexed›Thin content - 2
Add real content
At least a short unique description, plus details like hours, prices or photos.
- 3
Or hide weak pages
Remove them from the sitemap until they have content.
- 4
Run again
Fixed pages leave the list and are re-sent automatically.
Your site›Run now
If something goes wrong
- There are thousands of thin pages
- Fix the template, not each page: add fields that make every page different, such as descriptions, hours, prices, reviews or photos, and hide pages that have none of them.
- Pages have text but are still marked thin
- Look at unique words, not total words. Menus, footers and repeated paragraphs do not count as unique content.
- I removed pages from the sitemap but they still show
- Search engines take time to revisit. Add a noindex tag to weak pages if they should stay out entirely.
What to do next
After fixing, run IndexPedia again. Fixed pages leave the problem list and are sent to IndexNow automatically. Google re-evaluates them over the following days or weeks.
Next: Fix duplicate pages, titles and canonicals →