𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗢𝗳 𝗞𝗲𝗲𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗣𝗮𝗴𝗲𝘀 𝗔𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲 You have two options when dealing with thin pages on your website: delete them or keep them alive while hiding them from Google. I chose the second option.
I had links pointing to these URLs from earlier articles, social posts, and internal site navigation. Deleting them would break all these links. The pages are not wrong, they are just thin. The correct signal to Google is "don't evaluate these" rather than "these don't exist."
To achieve this, I set up a gate in my code with three conditions:
- At least 4 open-source alternatives listed
- Top alternative has 1,000+ GitHub stars
- Intro text is at least 80 characters
These conditions filter out obscure or unmaintained projects and ensure that only quality content is shown to Google. The gate runs automatically at every build, and entries that gain another alternative or get a longer intro will become discoverable without any manual action.
Currently, 18 of 80 entries pass the gate. The nightly ETL upgrades entries progressively, and the curated count will grow as the content improves.
To hide pages from Google, I use the following methods:
- Noindex meta tag
- Sitemap exclusion
- RSS feed exclusion
- Internal navigation exclusion
Categories follow the same logic, and only indexable categories are shown on the homepage and in the footer navigation.