40% Of SEOs Say Farmer/Panda Hurt Their Sites In Google

Mar 11, 2011 • 8:30 am | comments

(18) by Barry Schwartz | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization

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On February 24th, the Google Farmer Update touched down and it changed 12% of Google's search results. Sounds big, doesn't it? But how many of the readers here, a good sampling of SEOs, did it impact overall?

I ran a poll about five days after Farmer/Panda was rolled out asking how did this update impact you. We had 313 responses to date, which isn't a bad sampling size. Of course, you have to consider those who were impacted are more likely to respond, but anyway, let me share the results with you.

40% said Less Google Traffic (Negative Impact) (128)
25% said Same Google Traffic (No Impact) (80)
18% said More Google Traffic (Positive Impact) (56)
14% said Don't Know Yet (44)
1.6% said an Other answer... (5)

I certainly hope you are not part of that 40% but if you are, we do have some actionable advice from Google. Google said if you were hit then you need to remove the low quality content from your web site. Once you do that and Google notices the change, you should start ranking normally again.

Our ongoing coverage and stories on the Content Farmer/Panda update: