Publishing pages with thin content, update later?

[TomBinga1125]

So I have about 285 pages I created with very, very thin content on each. Each is unique, and each serves its own purpose.

My question is, do you guys think it is wise to publish all of these at once to just get them out there and update each as we go along? Each page is very laser targeted and I anticipate that a large handful will actually rank soon after publishing.

Thanks!

Tom

[EGOL]

Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website.

If this is making many pages for each location, then I would worry about them.  However, if all of this information is on a single page then you might be fine.  If I owned a company like this I would require each location to give me substantive content.

Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed?

I republished two of my thin content pages last week.  These were noindexed for about two years.  They were upgraded from two or three sentences and one photo to nearly 1000 words and four or five photos.  One appeared in the index about five days later and went straight to #4 for a moderately difficult single word query.  That single word query is the name of a software product, the name of some type of "gold" in the minecraft video game and has a lot of competition from .gov and .edu. .

The second one was published about eight days ago and we have not seen it in the SERPs yet.  This is an unusually long time for us to wait on a republished page for this site which has a DA of about 80.

The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.

I have never done this.  I just republish the page.

[TomBinga1125]

Thanks Andy, I appreciate the response. This was a semi-large project with the main goal of capturing hyper-local leads. I guess once you throw locations into the mix it runs an even bigger chance of being hit due to popular practice of creating a page for every damn city in the country in hopes of ranking locally.

Fortunately we have real locations across the US but I don't want Google to think we're trying to dupe anyone.

Thanks again
Tom

[TomBinga1125]

That's the answer I was expecting. The website I'm referencing has about 4,000 indexed pages, and those 285 may be enough to do some damage.

To give you an example (this mimics exactly what I'm doing), take a business with multiple locations. Each location has their own page, and each location page has their own departments listed with their own pages as well. Each department then has some content such as the NAP, an employee directory, and links to other resourceful pages on the website. Yeah or nay to that?

Also, if I "noindex" the pages to start, add some good content then "index" them, how long in your experience has it taken until you saw a considerable increase in traffic/see those pages indexed? I know that's a site-by-site, page-by-page kind of question but I'm curious to know.

The way I would approach it would be to crawl those pages manually in Search Console (RIP Webmaster Tools) once I updated the "index" tag.

Thoughts?

Thanks!
Tom

[Andy-Halliday]

Hi

I agree with the above, you run the risk of getting hit by Panda. If these pages are important to have live to help customers, then surely your priority should be to get good content on their to help your customers / potential customers. If they land on a low quality page with very little content, are they likely to stick around.

I wouldn't put any live until you have the content sorted. I would work out the priority and start there and once the content is good then put live.

There is probably a Panda update around the corner and you don't want to get hit with hit and then you are waiting for Google to release the next version to get out of it.

I wouldnt even run the risk of putting them live with noindex.

Unless of course as said above you have 100,000+ pages of amazing quality content then it probably wont affect you.

Thanks

Andy

[EGOL]

In my opinion, publishing a lot of thin content pages will get you into trouble with the Panda algorithm.   One of my sites had a lot of these types of pages and it was hit with a Panda problem.  Most pages on the site were demoted in search.   I noindexed those thin content pages and the site recovered in a few weeks.

Here is the code that I used...  name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

Although those pages had thin content, they were still valuable reference for my visitors.  That is why I noindexed them instead of deleting them.

Those pages have been noindexed for about two years with no problems.  Slowly, I am adding a good article to those pages to reduce their number.  I worry that some day, Google might change their minds and hit sites that have lots of thin content pages that are noindexed.

I don't know how big your website is.  But I am betting that 285 very very thin pages added to a website of a couple thousand pages will be a problem  (that's about what I had when my site had a problem).  However, if that many very very thin pages are added to a website with 100,000 pages you might get away with it.

Good luck