Google Panda Recovery
In February 2011, Google took action against websites containing“low-quality”, “thin” or duplicated/ scraped content such as content farms. Google announced the Panda update impacted nearly 12% of search engine results in the United States, which was a greater impact than most Google algorithm changes.
When the Google Panda update was launched, a lot of high traffic websites felt the effects of having backlinks from low quality scraper sites and these low quality sites seemed to have the following 3 characteristics in common:
Content on the site was very low quality, thin or duplicate
User experience was not taken into consideration when the website was built which then contributed to an overall low quality site.
Majority of the site content was written strictly for the purpose of SEO and ranking, not for speaking to the user
Content was also being copied from other websites
This is where the alternative name “Farm Update” came from, because it was targeting websites that had inbound links from sites that had pages filled with content that was created solely for the purpose of ranking, these sites were nicknamed “content farms”. Websites that are article directories and review sites are the usual “content farm” culprits and the Google Panda update