Issue: Thin Content Medium

What this means

Thin content pages don't have enough substance to be useful to searchers or AI systems. They're at risk of being filtered out of training data and skipped in search results. The JSON field is thin_content_pages.

Detection condition

Triggered when either condition is met:

• Word count below min_words threshold (default: 120 words)
• Unique text ratio below min_unique_ratio_percent (default: 18%)

Both thresholds are configurable in seodiff.yaml under thin_content_checks.

Severity escalation

Condition	Severity
Word count < 50	Critical — extremely thin, likely broken
Words 50–119 or unique ratio < 18%	Medium — thin but potentially intentional

This issue is suppressed when fewer than 5 pages are sampled, to avoid false positives from small crawls.

Impact on scores

Severity weight: 7 (medium) or 20 (critical). Deductions: −20 on Indexability, dampened as a heuristic issue. Thin content is a strong signal for search engine quality filters.

Common causes

• Stub pages: Pages created by CMS with minimal placeholder text.
• Category pages: Index pages that are mostly navigation links with no descriptive text.
• pSEO pages with sparse data: Programmatic pages where the data source has limited information for some entries.
• JS rendering failures: Content loaded via JavaScript that the crawler couldn't execute.

How to fix

1. Add substantive, unique content to pages below the 120-word threshold.
2. For category/listing pages: add introductory text, descriptions, or FAQs.
3. For pSEO: set a minimum data threshold — don't generate pages for entries with insufficient data.
4. Consider consolidating multiple thin pages into a single comprehensive page.
5. If pages are intentionally brief (e.g., contact, redirect), adjust min_words in your config or exclude them from the scan.