How common is the "Thin Content" Manual Penalty?

For the first time ever I got a "Thin Content" penalty. I've worked with sites that had 100s/1000s of the same pages with just a different city each page and never once had an issue.


I'm trying to get feedback on how common this penalty is? Out of 50+ sites that should trigger this by definition, this is the first one ever.


It just so happened that it was a brand new domain and had links aggressively built to it.


Algorithms are triggered by thresholds...I think I just might of hit the goldilocks zone for this one I guess...

Im thinkin you were hit more by the aggressive linkbuilding than the "thin content" from your description.

A manually applied penalty, along with a message? Or just a drop in rankings?

One of my site was a victim of the Google Panda penalty back in Feb 2013. The reason I found was excessive use of the bold tags, keywords repetition, very little content on pages (less than 200 words) and a sidebar widget which was displaying popular pages with their titles and descriptions on all the pages....

I corrected all the mistakes... and after 2 months I got my site back.

I'm guessing it was the aggressive link building too that triggered a manual review.

If it was the "Thin Content" itself, then any site launched while under construction would get this penalty.


It was a manual penalty and it was titled "Thin Content"