Spotting thin pages: word-count tool vs. demand check

Spotting thin pages: word-count tool vs. demand check
This week on the radar — the helpful-content cleanup where the obvious metric misleads.

🔗 [Crawler word-count / similarity reports] — flag near-duplicate and ultra-short pages fast; good first pass, but length isn't quality.
🔗 [GSC impressions per URL] — pages with content but zero impressions over 90 days are the real 'thin to Google,' regardless of word count.
🔗 [Analytics engagement signals] — high pogo-sticking on long pages reveals 'thin' that a word counter rates as substantial.

The tradeoff: word count finds skeletal pages; demand-and-engagement data finds unhelpful pages, which is what the system actually targets. A 2,000-word page nobody finds useful is thinner than a 300-word answer that fully resolves intent.

One to bookmark: a 'zero-impression in 90 days' GSC export — a far better prune list than any word-count threshold.