When starting a new site

[TheRealOBX]

I know many members operate multiple sites. I would love some input on what I should do. I guess my first question is how do you do it? I have a blog here, my main site, site's blog, articles, and an AR blog. I feel like it is a struggle to keep them all up to date with original content.

My problem is I have two domains I want to make into sites. Both sites I would like to start in the next 6-12 months. Is it beneficial to start a site with a limited amount of content and gradually add content over the next coming months or to wait and add a large amount of content at once?

[u2man]

Yes it's a struggle to keep up with content on all the different sites, blogs etc.
I would start the site and add content when you have time. It's going to take some time to age anyways.
The more websites....leads, leads. This really is just a game of getting as many leads as possible and usually multiple websites can produce more leads especially if you are targeting slightly different markets.

[century21pei]

By adding content slowly you keep your website "fresh" in the eyes of search engines. If you do all your content at once, it won't get off the ground as quickly and you might lose some sales in the waiting period.

[TheRealOBX]

Thanks. I was thinking the same thing. Guess I'll have to get them up and running.

[Philman]

If you plan on starting a new site, it really is important to have gradual progress regarding content and links versus just trying to get everything at once. If you try to set up everything immediately, it might trigger some red flags and put your site into the Google Sandbox, which is never a good thing.

If you don't know what the Google Sandbox is, it is pretty much a probationary period where your site will not show up for any search engine result for anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple of months.

[jamesww]

I am with everyone else you get the best results from continiously adding to your content. Just make sure you do not add to it to rapidly. Although this is probably not a problem for you since you are already having trouble keeping up.

[TheRealOBX]

I guess I will have to get some hosting for the sites. It seems gradual steady content is the way to go. I can keep up with an entry every so many days for the new sites.

[mcsolas]

I was recently approached with this situation. I have taken over 2 sites, created one of our own.. and have several landing pages planned, etc. They wanted it done all at once, but I just focused on the core site, then worked one each other item one by one.. blogs need updating, so for stuff like that, you have to plan some time for new content creation.

[RonnieG]

I have been through this a few times, and on a new site, Google and other SEs take their own sweet time to index everything anyway, and even more to establish rankings. So adding 100-200 pages right away should not be a major issue. There is no "penalty" or "sandbox" involved, just the normal delays in new content discovery, indexing and ranking at work, especially for new sites for which the SEs have not yet established a regular crawl schedule. Now if you all of a sudden add 100-200 IBLs, that would probably get their attention!

ps: When you add a REW integrated IDX, and even a few well-designed community search pages, you instantly get hundreds or even thousands of new pages. And when your local MLS gets 50-250 new listings a day, and drops 100-200 expired sold listings from the IDX feeds, those don't hurt either, and you have no control over any of that. The SEs simply add/delete the content as it happens, or 3-4 weeks after it happens, depending on how often it crawls your site.

[mcsolas]

Ive found registering a (valid) sitemap with google helps. You can also now ping submit yahoos service. Seems to be more and more effective as sites grow larger.