Google’s Farmer/Panda algorithm updates emerged a few weeks back and after that many sites were affected by the wild fluctuations of rankings and of course it left many confounded and distressed. Other sites were not affected that much. Google’s Farmer/Panda updates have left everyone worried about their website rankings. Majority of webmasters are still struggling to find out the most appropriate way to pull through the effects of the updates and to look for the best strategies to counteract it. Here are a few ideas for determining a strategy to get back your ratings.

Firstly look for a way to measure how much you were affected by this update. Confirm with your Analytics programs for clues. Look for patterns in drops and major large-scale over all drops. If you are affected mainly by the update then you definitely need to do some work to upgrade the quality of your website content.

If your rankings were not hit hard, but you still encountered a considerable fall in rankings, then most likely you are being moved by Google after recalculating the amount of useful content footprint from your site in its index.

You may also be subjected to rankings drop for both reasons. On your site you may have portions of quality and valuable contents but still have sections that are bringing you down, you must recognize these as soon as possible.

Google made it public that they are targeting sites with low value content. Start by deleting or blocking the thin and auto-generated content sections of your website from Google so that they will not be indexed. Overall quality score of the site can be influenced by the low quality on one section of the site.
Here I repost collection of strategies being talked about in different forums:

Mentioned below are few strategies for separating your thin or lower quality content from the rest of your website and other approaches used to fix websites.

•    Tackle the considerably affected pages first, get rid of them.
•    Use Meta Robots noindex, pursue tag on individual pages.
•    Permanently erase the pages.
•    Instead of erasing the page, work on the content of the page without any delay.
•    Decrease the number of internal links.
•    Make the content X ad density ratio better. Add more exclusive content on ad heavy pages.
•    Delete unnecessary and outmoded pagination.
•    Use the rel=”canonical” attribute on replica pages.
•    Do not take any action, wait and watch to see what happens.
•    Remove any junk from your website by visiting old and forgotten parts of your site.
•    Address boilerplate content. Lower it or try making it distinctive for each page.
•    Let Google know about your opinion on the update and how it affected your website.
•    Give in a re-inclusion request after you cleaned up and improved the portions of your website.

An important advice on the website was to start by finding out the main wrong doer or offender first and tackle each one individually. This was, even if there is a "site-wide" component at work on your site, the main power of the update is being aimed at individual URLs.

It is uncertain how this Google Farmer/Panda update will eventually turn out. For many of us, we need to be updated and watch blogs, forums closely so we can be side by side of the current strategies or approaches that are being developed to work within the new Google Farmer/Panda Algorithm.

Posted: 21/03/11 11:50