How long can a thin site stay thin?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I have a project to complete that involves building a relatively small cluster of sites (28) on different aspects of the same subject. The most cost effective way for me to complete this particular project is to set up all of the sites/domains, they share data from the same database, and have a default generic template/data in place via that database.

Over the span of 9 months or so a group of people will be going over the existing pages to add content as required.

It dawned on me that during that period of time a search engine employee may come along and slap a "thin site" type penalty on it making it impossible to rank for (most likely) each sites main keywords.

How long can the sites stay thin without too much worry about that?

[buckworks]

Consider making the sites noindex to start with, so they don't get indexed until they gain enough content muscle to be respectable.

No sane search engine could complain that a site is thin if you've kept it out of their index!

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I'm not building them for the search engines however and some people, many in this sector, will be excited too see their topic covered. For that reason alone the pages have value to real people, they just won't pass the automated sniff test imo.

I don't care if search doesn't index them all but I am concerned about a human ban. This is a case where it makes sense for humans but bots may disagree.

Is there a general timeframe in which a site goes from All Is Well to Pending Review to Banned on a keyword level ?

[tedster]

My sense of it is that a human review happens when an impression first shows up in the top 30 for a competitive search term. I don't think it ever gets completely "banned" on a keyword level, but rather it gets flagged and filtered out when a human judges it as a thin affiliate. It still can recover from that filtering when it gets fat - but that may take a while, compared to showing up in its "fat" state for a first indexing/ranking.

[futureX]

If you noindex tag it google may take a while to reindex everything... Personally I would suggest not putting the sites live until the information is actually there.

[SEOLair]

One possibility is to no-index it, like people have said.

I think a "human ban" is rare, especially for small sites. Unless you are ranking for competitive terms and bringing attention to yourself, you should be fine.

One strategy I've seen implemented with good results is to have the "thin site" indexed even if it doesn't get content for a year or so. The reasoning behind this is to build history with Google. While it's easier to make new sites rank than it used to be, it still helps if the sites is somewhat aged.

[leadegroot]

A suggestion - don't monetise until the pages have the weight (ie have a slightly different template for the lighter pages)
If it isn't an affiliate page, it can hardly be pinged as a thin affiliate :)

[Robert Charlton]

...a relatively small cluster of sites (28) on different aspects of the same subject.

If you intend to keep these noindexed forever, you clearly won't have a problem with the search engines. I suspect, though, that search is somewhere at the back of your mind, so a question I would ask is how different are these sites really going to be. Will they have different user bases? Will they serve different needs?

From the search perspective... are the domains going to be different enough that they have substantially independent backlink profiles, with trusted links coming from independent sources? Are there enough trusted independent sources in fact to give backlink diversity to a group of sites on the same subject?

Offhand, 28 seems too many different aspects of the same subject to me... but that may depend on what you mean by "different", by "aspect", and by "subject". If the subject is "life", you may have a lot of wiggle room.

If the subject is webmastering skills, you also may be able to break it down into so many different components that you could support separate domains (I'm assuming keyword motivated). Or, you could choose to build one site, like WebmasterWorld, which has evolved to where its individual categories have grown... over the years... to now roughly 100 different categories that might be described as "different aspects of the same subject". Amazon and Wikipedia are other sites that grew and added categories as they went.

If the subject is widgets, and you're breaking your domain distinctions down into adjectives, word forms, synonyms, and stemming, you're clearly on the wrong track. (I'm saying this more for newbies and less for the original poster, who I suspects knows the difference.)

Over the span of 9 months or so a group of people will be going over the existing pages to add content as required.

I'd guess more than 9 months will be needed, but it will come down eventually to how really different and independent these sites are, and on the independence of the backlinks and traffic sources. If I were doing this, I think I'd go for the one site built-up-over-time approach... where I'm building trust for only one domain.