The page has very little text

Why it matters

A page with almost no words gives a search engine almost nothing to match a search against, and gives a visitor who arrives almost no reason to stay. Google's guidance is about whether a page is "helpful, reliable, people-first content", not about a word count, and it names "thin affiliate pages" and pages "created primarily for search engines" as the thing to avoid.

We count the visible words, with scripts and styles left out. Under 200 is where it is worth looking: often the page is a stub that was published and forgotten, a category page with nothing in it yet, or — increasingly — a page whose words arrive by JavaScript, which we don't run and neither does a link-preview scraper.

200 words is our rule of thumb and nothing more. Plenty of good pages are shorter than this; that is why it is a notice and why pages that are meant to be brief (contact, legal, thank-you, basket) are left out of it entirely.

Source: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

How to fix it

Read the page and decide which it is:

- Meant to be short, and we have it wrong: nothing to do. - A stub: finish it, or take it out of the sitemap and noindex it until it is ready. A page that isn't worth reading isn't worth indexing. - A category or listing page: give it a paragraph that says what is in the category. The listing itself is usually links, which are not words. - The words arrive by script: render them in the HTML. Google renders pages eventually, but it crawls the HTML first, and no social scraper renders anything at all.

Examples

These are the rule's own test pages, and what it says about each. They are run on every change to the rule book.

<h1>Wedding cakes</h1>
<p>Coming soon.</p>

NoticeThe page has 4 words of visible text, headed "Wedding cakes". That is little for a search engine to match, or a visitor to read.

fail-stub

<h1>Wedding cakes in Leeds</h1>
<p>Our wedding cakes are baked in Leeds the week you collect them, never frozen and never bought in. We start with a conversation about the day itself, the room, the dress and the flowers, and we bring samples of four flavours so you can taste before you choose. Lemon and elderflower is the one most couples pick in summer; in winter it is usually the spiced fruit with brandy. Every tier is iced by hand and the sugar flowers are made petal by petal, which is why we ask for six weeks. Delivery is included anywhere in West Yorkshire and we set the cake up ourselves, because a stacked cake travels badly and a collapsed one cannot be mended on the day. We have been doing this for eleven years and have never missed a wedding. If you would like to talk it through, bring photographs of anything you have liked, and we will tell you honestly what will work and what will not survive a warm marquee in July. Tasting appointments are on Saturday mornings and take about an hour. There is no charge for them and no obligation to order afterwards, though most people do decide on the day. </p>

PassedThe page has 205 words of visible text.

pass-enough