Google’s Panda update has been implemented worldwide a few weeks ago. The whole objective of the Google Panda update was to eliminate low quality content. However many website owners who were affected feel they have been victims and do not fall in the low quality content category.

I had a chance to discuss about this with one such victim. He said “It was the 24th of February that my site was affected and the website traffic went down from 50,000 US visitors to 24,000 US Visitors per day, which is like 60% less traffic. I was in panic mode as less traffic means less business and less earnings. After some research, I found out that it was because of the Google Panda update. I went crazy when I read that Google was actually targeting content farms. I didn’t know how they categorized my website as a content farm.”

What could be the possible reasons if your website went down in ranking because of the Google panda update though you think you are not a content farm ?  Here are some of the reasons that might have contributed to it.

1. If you had provided RSS feeds for your website and if many other website have syndicated them in their pages. When Google finds the same content in many web sites, it tries to rank the original site in the top position. What if the syndicated content in other websites got indexed before your website ? There is a high chance that many of the syndicating webstites got penalized and as a result you lost the link value from those web sites.

2. If you had a tag cloud on your website. if you have a blog, the tag cloud would have grown in size over time. Say 100 Keywords and relevant to each other. The tag cloud might have been conveyed a keyword stuffing message to the spider.  One Remedy would be to keep as less tags as possible which would increase load time also.

3. If you had a search results page in you website and the search results in your website got indexed. these pages might give an impression for duplicate content within your website. You could use the no-index and no-follow tags extensively to avoid this.

4. In the process of building links if you had submitted one article to many article directories. These article pages from where you had the links back to your main site would have straight away communicated that it was a clear marketing effort and that it was not a user generated back link.

There are many more things that affected websites that are not content farms, however its for good and made us understand the ranking algorithm. In my discussions with a few victims who lost ranking, what I hear is that though they have lost ranking the number of visitors have not gone down. Google’s panda update had definitely improved the quality of search results. Many webmasters shared to me that though they have lost ranking on certain keywords, they have gained ranking on other keywords for which they really had quality content on their website. Some website owners who lost ranking said that just by removing the duplicate content pages and improving the page load time increased their ranking.