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Google's Farmer/Panda update, which was rolled out to the US on February 24th, and affected us, has been rolled out to all English-language queries yesterday afternoon. We were hurt even more. Still, surprised to not hear ANY stories of ANYONE recovering.

Anyone else blasted?

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Dani AI

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Several members here (, , , ) are experiencing the same symptom: big organic traffic shifts after a quality-focused algorithm change. The practical takeaway from Google’s own guidance is simple — Panda-style systems aim to demote low‑quality or shallow content, and the right recovery is a site‑wide quality remediation, not quick hacks. (webmasters.googleblog.com)

A concise, repeatable audit workflow to triage and recover:

  1. Confirm scope: use Search Console Performance + Google Analytics to compare clicks/sessions by date, landing page, country and device. Export the landing pages that lost the most traffic.
  2. Prioritize: rank pages by lost traffic + business value (conversions, revenue, brand pages).
  3. Content audit: for each priority page check originality, depth, author expertise, spelling/accuracy, ad-to-content ratio, and duplicate/near‑duplicate content.
  4. Decide action per URL: improve and expand, merge similar pages, 301-redirect, or noindex/remove. Google recommends removing/merging low‑quality pages where appropriate.
  5. Technical checks: use Fetch as Google / fetch & render, confirm resources (CSS/JS) aren’t blocked, fix rendering or mobile issues, and correct broken templates.
  6. Human review + iteration: have unbiased readers rate trust and usefulness, then re-measure.

Use Search Console and Analytics side‑by‑side while you work, and follow Google’s debugging checklist for traffic drops to decide whether to act fast or test changes first. (developers.google.com)

A few cautions and timing notes: check the Manual Actions report first — algorithmic drops (Panda) are different from manual penalties and are visible in Search Console if present. Recovery is possible but often tied to subsequent algorithm refreshes or broader core updates, so changes can take weeks or months to show full effect; keep improving and monitoring rather than flipping everything at once. (developers.google.com)

If a short checklist would help (example export queries, CSV columns to pull, or a triage spreadsheet template), that can be posted next — the right data makes remediation far faster.

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Member Avatar for canadafred

Just read ( blog searchenginewatch com/110412-160000 ) good article about how Panda is affecting authoritative UK web site. Some highly credible sites up to 99.7% down in traffic as a result. Ouch! There were some winners in the initial algorhythmic change though, ironically including blogspot.com up 22.80 percent.


quoted "...Much like the devastation unleashed on unsuspecting sites in the U.S. in February, today price comparison sites and many content sites (e.g., news, reviews, blogs) Google has deemed "shallow" have been hammered in the UK search results, according to preliminary data released today by Searchmetrics ..."

Edited by canadafred because: n/a
Member Avatar for Dani

Yup, our Canadian and UK traffic took huge hits.

Member Avatar for movielinks

I lost around 45% of my traffic due this freaking Panda :(

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