You probably haven’t missed the latest update, Google changed 12% of the search results in the biggest update for quite some time. The update got the name Panda Update internally at Google from the name of one of the engineers. It’s a big update, it might or might not affect you but you can be certain – it will change the business for a lot of companies.

If JC Penny was the the big deal before, the Panda Update is the big thing now. Some SEO:s I’ve been talking to believes it to be the biggest update since Florida back in 2003. I’m not certain that I agree but there is no doubt it has had a lot effect on the search community. We still know very little about how it works and there are a lot of theories. We do have some data on what causes a site to drop in traffic though and I thought I’d walk you through it.

What is the Panda Update?

Google, through Matt Cutts, announced a while ago that they were going to get the content farms in order and the Panda Update is a result of this. Hence the nickname spawned by Danny Sullivan “Farmers Update.” It is a filter targeting very large sites with poor content. A typical site targeted is ezinearticles.com, a site to upload articles and that gets a lot of traffic from a lot of different keywords and phrases. It is a global filter, affecting the whole site, not just parts deemed to be “Content Farm” and it will drop you a few positions over the whole spectra of keywords.

There are a number of factors that we have found to be important for the filter to activate (Thanks to Magnus Foss, Jonas Orvarsson and Björn Michels at Lead 2 Gen for help with the research).

1. It has to be a big site, lots of pages is a fundament of this filter.
2. The site is not an authority. We found that sites over a certain level of authority are spared the filter even though they otherwise fall in the category.
3. The site has lots of ads. To many ads on a page is one of the fators activating the filter.
4. The site is visible on a lot of long tail searches.
5. The site has thin content.

Not all of the factors are necessary every time, a site with very poor content doesn’t necessarily have to have a lot of ads to end up in the filter. Sadly, it’s hard to deal with the real problem here, if you have a giant site but with poorly written articles it will be a massive job trying to improve the content enough. If your business model is ads-based you wont really want to remove the ads even if it would get you back to your former positions, what good will the traffic do you if you can’t monetize.

The guide to get out of the filter

Don’t worry though there are a number of fixes that will take care of the problem without you having to rewrite all the articles. You can download the PDF with the guides to getting out of the filter by sharing this post:

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