What Google Panda / Farmer Means to You – 5 Actions to Take Now

April 19, 2011 by Daniel Sharkov|

The Following article is a guest post by Kathy Alice. Kathy explains what changes you need to consider on your site after the Google Panda/Farmer update, which took and it is still taking a lot of “victims”.

Farmer, Panda what’s the difference?

On February 24th, 2011 Google launched, in their words, “ a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking”which was aimed at reducing rankings for low quality sites. With a “noticeable” impact to 11.8% search queries in the US, the webmaster and SEO community quickly took notice and named the update “Farmer” due to its perceived targeting of so called content farms; those sites that have many of pages of content, usually from many contributors, and often of lower quality.

However, as the dust cleared and webmasters started reporting in on the impact on their sites, it emerged that impact was more widespread. For example, many eCommerce sites were affected as well. More recent discussions refer to the change as “Panda” which is the Google code name for it. So “Farmer” and “Panda” refer to the same Google update.

There has been lots of speculation on what exactly Panda considers low quality content. Google itself has shared some hints in the Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal Wired interview, in the Webmaster blog and there have been some useful case studies on SEO blogs made. However, Google never shares exactly what its algorithm does, so in the end you have to make some educated guesses.

Here is my take on 5 actions you can take to thrive in the post Panda world:

Determine if you were affected

If you haven’t already, you should figure out whether you were affected. Hopefully you have your site set up in Google Analytics (or you have another way to measures your traffic). Check your traffic numbers for the period of Feb 22 – 25th and see whether you had a drop. Make sure you look at the non-paid search numbers and Google as a referrer. If you were affected you should do some more digging and determine if you have specific pages that lost traffic or whether it seems to affect your domain overall.

Address duplicate content problems.

A common problem on larger sites where multiple URLs can refer to the same content, you should also look for instances where your content appears more than once. For example on a blog you could have your full posts showing up on your archive, tag and category pages. These “aggregator” pages are good candidates for the noindex, follow tag which tells Google and the other search engines to crawl the page and follow the links but not add the page to its index.

Evaluate the quality of your pages.

Ask yourself the question, is your content unique and useful? Does it add value? This, by the way, should be criteria you apply to guest posts you accept on your blog. Don’t lower the bar just because someone else wrote the article. If you have low quality pages you should remove them or move them to another domain.

Do you have too many ads?

In the Wired interview, Matt Cutts mentioned one aspect they looked at was whether the site had too many ads. If you have pages that are comprised mostly of ads and navigation and are otherwise thin on content, add more content to the page. Also make sure the ads are not too intrusive when you read through the content.

Evaluate the user experience of your website.

It has been noted by a few SEOs that sites that could be considered content farms and are well designed seemed to have escaped Panda. If your site is hard to navigate and not well laid out you may need to improve its look, feel and functionality. Ask for feedback from others on whether your site is easy to use.

Fortunately my blog didn’t suffer any ill effects from Panda, if that is the case for you, congratulations! However keep in mind that Google is always tweaking and updating it’s algorithm, so it’s always possible for you to be impacted in the future. So keep delivering what Google wants, which is unique, fresh content that can’t be found anywhere else and you will be following a strategy that will keep the traffic coming.

Kathy Alice Brown is a SEO Consultant and builds well optimized WordPress sites. She blogs about WordPress, SEOand Online Marketing at her blog webenso.com. She also tweets at @kathyalice. Grab her free report on “5 Tips for Getting Your Website Found”to learn how to drive more traffic to your website.

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