Google May Be Penalizing AI-Generated Content As Thin Content

A forum website published a post on Reddit expressing disbelief that Google issued a manual action for thin content, finding it hard to reconcile how Google could send so much traffic for nearly twenty years only to find fault with it now. Google is calling it a manual action for thin content, but SEOs believe it may be for AI-generated content

Manual Action For Thin Content

According to the Reddit post, a forum received a manual action for thin content. The notification specifically pointed to over half a million posts in one specific category of the site, /threads/. They explained that it’s a partial manual action and that the penalization does not affect the rest of the site, just this one part of the website

They explained:

“The message (WNC‑651700, ~17 July 2026) is: “Thin content with little or no added value.”
It’s a partial manual action, meaning a human reviewer looked at part of the site, judged it unworthy of ranking, and suppressed it pending a reconsideration request

The Affects field names exactly one thing: the URL pattern windowsforum.com/threads/.
That’s 168,290 visible threads and over half a million posts, twenty years deep, suppressed together

No example URLs were provided. Not one.”

Thin Content

Google has multiple definitions of thin content. One of them,thin affiliate content, is content published on affiliate sites that are word for word duplicates of what is found on the merchant websites

Former Googler Matt Cutts has said that thin affiliate content lacks “original insight or research or analysis” or any other kind of content like original videos that “add value.”

Other forms of thin content:

• Syndicated content
• Article marketing content

Cutts has also explained that the opposite of thin content is content that site owners have written themselves, contains additional value, is unique, and leans in on the author’s actual expertise

That last part may be critical for understanding why the Redditor’s forum received a thin content warning, but not in the context that the site owners were thinking of

Why Is Actual Thin Content Not Penalized?

The part that confused the site owner is that there were two other sections of the website that were more clearly thin content, yet those web pages were not subject to a manual action. One section was a feed of syndicated headlines. The other section was an archived knowledge base. They said both sections have been inactive for three years, yet neither of them was called out for a manual action. It was the forum section of the site that received a manual action.

They wrote:

“The part that doesn’t reconcile

Two sections of the site are the obvious candidates for a thin‑content finding:

an old syndicated headline feed

an archived knowledge base

Together, that’s 11,927 threads with a mean age of about 12.5 years

…This material has been crawled, indexed, and ranked continuously through Panda, Penguin, the September 2023 helpful content update, and through the community’s migration from its original domain… Fifteen years, two domains, every major ranking change Google has shipped and it never drew a manual action.”

Redditors expressed outrage, with one saying that it’s the result of Google’s monopoly in search

Stablogger’s response was representative of the outrage many felt:

“This is pretty shocking indeed, especially knowing the reputation of this forum. Is there some thin content? Most certainly, but you have repetitive or pretty much empty threads on every single forum, you have them on Reddit, too

It’s the nature of user generated content, some threads attract loads of interaction, some don’t at all, but it can’t be the solution to simply delete thin threads without the consent of whoever posted them.”

Well, contrary to what Stablogger wrote, pruning thin or outdated conversations is an option and many forum site owners do it

Maybe Thin Content = AI Generated Content?

Google has in the past said that content that is AI-generated does not automatically mean it’s bad. However, Australian-based SEO Gagan Ghotra suggested that AI-generated content may be the reason for the thin content manual action

Ghotra tweeted:

Here’s a closeup of the screenshot:

The points of interest are that the forum characterizes its AI chatbot as a staff member, it has been active since 2023, and the chatbot has posted over a hundred thousand responses to questions

Authenticity And Value Add

The possible reason why AI-generated answers may be considered thin content is that the expected value add of forums is that the answers are based on actual human experience

AI does not have experience. It deals in received knowledge. Received knowledge is knowledge that comes from someone or somewhere else, like from a book or another website. There is no value add there in the context of a forum. It’s not what users expect when they post a question on a forum

Featured Image by Shutterstock/mundissima

CategoryNewsSEO

Source: www.searchenginejournal.com