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,…
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