The “Farmer” or “Panda” Google algorithmic update that was released in the US late February 2011 has now been rolled out to all out to all English language queries. Google explain “this change also goes deeper into the “long tail” of low-quality websites to return higher-quality results where the algorithm might not have been able to make an assessment before.”

Though this is specifically regarded as an algorithmic change the ability to dive deeper in to this data is yet another sign of Google’s ability to “crunch” data exceptionally well and maybe a bi product of the Caffeine update. This particular area was discussed on Wired.com with Amit Singhal saying that “Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.” Thus the need for further filtering.

This update also includes incorporating data about the sites that users block in Google which is something we have seen before in a variety of ways before such a starring system. How long this will last we shall have to wait and see.

Search Metrics has provided some statistics around the Panda UK update that will be hard to swallow as well as Sistrix. Though this update has not been all doom and gloom with winners including eBay, Econsultancy and This is Money showing uplift an uplift. Search Metrics provides a downloadable view of both the Winners and Losers.

A simple way of understanding how you have been affected from the Panda update is to look at your analytics; Focus only on non paid Google UK traffic and set the dates you wish to see the traffic data from around the 28th March 2011 to the present (or if you are historically looking at this post then 30^th April 2011 should do just fine). By looking at the data in graph format you should be able to see a change around the 11^th April 2011. Depending on the change you should see a positive or negative affect if you have been affected at all.

You maybe interested in what your competitors do and with that in mind it maybe useful using tools such as Compete or Hitwise to gain some useful competitor insight. Using Compete maybe more useful to some of people as you can get free access but wait until April is finished to receive better data set. For now as an example, as the US rollout was executed earlier have a look at the Wisegeek data. They were regarded as one sites that got hit hard from Panda update.

Though we can’t segment the data we can see the negative affect. In the case of wikiHow here is a positive affect.

If you search around you’ll see many guides advising how to recover and negate the affect of this latest update. One of the main themes seems to be removing low quality content by blocking Google. This solution seems to be derived from Google employee Wysz

“…you should evaluate all the content on your website and do your best to improve the quality of the pages on your domain … removing low quality or duplicate pages or moving them to a different domain could improve your rankings for the high quality content.”

However further to this Vanessa Fox had an update from SMX West:

“Google’s Maile Ohye recommended using a <meta name=robots content=noindex> on the pages until they have unique and high-quality content on them. She recommends this over blocking via robots.txt so that search engines can know the pages exist and start building history for them so that once the pages are no longer blocked, they can more quickly be ranked appropriately. I noted in the panel where we discussed this that an exception might be for a very large site, robots.txt would ensure that the search engine bots were spending the crawl time available on the pages with high-quality content.”

Included in this update was the idea that Ad to Content ratio was a factor with Matt Cutts saying “having advertising on your site does not inherently reduce its quality. However, it is possible to overdo it.”

Vanessa has an excellent post that summarises her best parts of SMX. I thoroughly recommend reading it as well as Richard Baxter’s post that is featured on SEOmoz titled “Weed Out Your Lowest Performing Pages”

It seems that in some cases Google seems to be getting it wrong even with the right intentions. However I would have to reiterate some of the wise words I have read that :

- Find the pages that are hit worst on your site

- Start evaluating these pages from a:

- Content perspective; Is this page a duplicate, spun article or a quality unique blog post

- Ad-to-content ratio; Does the advertising out weigh the content? Where does the advertising sit? Above or below the fold?

- If you have a large site that has a large number of pages that are of low quality then look to either improve the quality of these pages by adding unique content for instance or block them from Google with <meta name=robots content=noindex> or 301 redirect permanently.

One thing to remember is where others maybe claiming that their site fits all the criteria as outlined in the Wired interviews and the online advice available, don’t forget that your previously links that come from tactics such as article submission sites and press release sites may have lost value and in turn are not of any value to you.