Thin content
Pages with fewer than 300 words of visible text. A page with very little text gives search engines and assistants little to understand or quote. The line is a guide, not a law: a contact page can be short on purpose, a category or product page usually should not be.
WarningCONTENT-001 · Content · checked on every page
Where it usually comes from
Product pages with only a name and a price, category pages with only a grid of products, and pages whose text is loaded by JavaScript after the page arrives.
How to fix it
- Look at which pages are short and whether they are meant to rank.
- For those that are, add what a visitor actually needs: what it is, who it is for, the details that decide a purchase.
- Do not pad pages to pass a number. Accept short pages that are short on purpose.
How to check it yourself
Select the text of the page and paste it into a word counter, leaving out the menu and the footer.
What it looks like in a report
Warning The page has 140 words, 160 short of 300. · /product/* · 80 pages
Product pages carry little more than a name and a price; a description field per product is the fix. (An example shop; the numbers are illustrative.)
How the audit counts it
CONTENT-001 is a warning in the content category, and weighs moderately in that category’s score. When it appears on many pages built from the same template, the report shows it once, with the number of pages it covers — because one change in the template fixes all of them.
If the finding is deliberate on your site, it can be accepted as intentional in the report. It then leaves the list and the score, and comes back on its own if what it shows changes.
Other content checks
- Images without alternative text · CONTENT-002
- The title is nowhere in the H1 · CONTENT-003
- Very low text-to-HTML ratio · CONTENT-004
- Duplicate titles · CONTENT-005
- Duplicate meta descriptions · CONTENT-006
- A template settles just under the line · CONTENT-007
- Pages that repeat each other’s text · CONTENT-008
Find it on your site
A Trakis audit runs this check and the other 65 on your site, and tells you on how many pages each one sits. Or go back to all the rules.