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Thin content

Pages that add little or nothing beyond what already exists, typically produced at scale from a template.

The classic form is the location page: one paragraph, the city name substituted, published fifty times. Also product pages with only a manufacturer description, tag archives with one item, and pages generated from a database with no editorial layer.

The damage is not confined to the pages themselves. A large proportion of thin pages affects how a search engine assesses the whole domain, which means the good pages pay for the bad ones.

The test is simple and unforgiving: if the page survives a find-and-replace on its distinguishing term, it is a template rather than a page, and it should not be published.

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