How Does the Panda/Farmer Update Impact Affiliates?

On the 24th Feb did you notice a serious dip in traffic to your affiliate sites? Then you’re not alone, Google rolled out a new algorithm update designed to improve the relevancy of their search results by reducing the number of “content farms” or “low quality websites.”

The change however has had a catastrophic impact on a large number of websites (including affiliates) across the globe. I’ve personally seen some of my sites US Google traffic plummet by ~40% but seen an increase in others.

What do we know about this change?

A lot of what we initially know is based on speculation using the limited data that we’ve seen, Matt Cutts & Vanessa Fox have give some details out but the best summary of what Google is looking for in terms of quality can be found in this SMX Summary

There’s a number of things that still don’t add up for me with this update:

1. Why weren’t a lot of the major content farms actually hit? eHow is a prime example here.
2. If you have “low quality content” on your site Google treats your whole site as low quality. One would have thought Google would be able to assess quality on a page by page basis.
3. I’ve seen a number of shopping sites hit badly like theFind, yet others such has Bizrate remain unaffected.

What can you do if you’ve been affected?

I’m very reluctant to say change something right away as Googlebot still appears to be very slow at reflecting new cache dates on pages, one can only assuming that Google are tweaking this algo for another re-ranking soon. This means that you have two options:

Wait it out – there’s a chance that the algo will become less agressive & you’ll emerge back to your original positions.

Or you can start making chances now to anticipate the next layer of the algorithm.

What changes should you look at implementing?

Google wants you to remove low quality content from your site, but we still have no idea what low quality looks like in the eyes of Google. I’ve start making some changes to sites which includes (but not limited to):

1. Adding noindex to thin pages (think tag pages, empty review pages etc)
2. Fixing canonical or duplicate issues (www/non-www)
3. Fixing up all reported issues in Webmaster Tools
4. Re-evaluate any content sources that you’re using that others might also be using (think uniqueness)
5. If you believe you’ve been targeted wrongly I’d file a reconsideration request
6. Improve the content to ad ratio on your pages
7. Reduce usage of boilerplate text across multiple pages
8. Ensure that the main content of your pages are greater than the sum of the header & footer
9. Give Google feedback on the Panda Update in this Google Webmaster thread

I’m interested to know if you’ve had sites hit (especially affiliate sites):