Advice on registering domains with a similar patterns

I'm looking to set up several sites that talk about specific categories. I planned to register domains for each category to simplify it. I was thinking of registering the domains in a pattern. For example, if I were going to set up a basketball, tennis, or golf site, I'd do something like - basketballtalk.com, tennistalk.com, and golftalk.com.

They'd all be independently hosted. Let me know if that's a big no-no.

Thanks,

the domain names are ok.

The only problem might come if you interlink them together to manipulate google rankings, in that case google might penalize all of these sites. But if you don't interlink them together to manipulate the rankings you'll be fine (even if you host them all on the same server it can still be fine)

Unfortunately, I don't know how google determines which webmasters manipulate rankings and which ones interlink them for other reasons, so I'd say you have 50% chance of not getting penalized

But otherwise (if you don't link them together) I don't see any problem...

If you want to not show the fact that the websites are all owned by you, you can switch the domains up a bit, so human competitors researching them would have a harder time making the connection. Otherwise, it shouldn't be a problem especially if the pattern is as generic as your example. Also, if you could get the baseball domain instead of the baseballtalk domain or replace the talk with something category specific, it might actually be better.