Google has been explaining that websites hit by the Panda update (aka the Farmer update) are likely to be hit on all pages on the site, even if some pages are good quality and that the way to get out of the update is to remove low quality content.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Googlers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts spoke about the recent algorithm update and how the “caffeine update” had played a part in the need for identifying and weeding out “shallow content”. Matt Cutts described the benefits of the update saying

Caffeine benefits both searchers and content owners because it means that all content (and not just content deemed “real time”) can be searchable within seconds after its crawled.

This meant there was an abundance of content that wasn’t all necessarily rich in it’s quality as Amit Singhal described

Our index grew so quickly, and we were just crawling at a much faster speed. When that happened, we basically got a lot of good fresh content, and some not so good. The problem had shifted from random gibberish, which the spam team had nicely taken care of, into somewhat more like written prose. But the content was shallow.

How website owners can identify the pages that Google deem as ‘low quality’

To check through all of your pages manually is a time consuming task and even then it’s difficult to really know whether the changes you make are to the pages deemed as ‘low quality’.

Check your pages by using the bounce rate and time on-site metrics from Google Analytics to identify your weaker pages.

In Google Analytics go to Traffic Souces > Google Organic > and view by landing page. Then add “&limit=100000″ to the URL so you can download all the data. Finally click the CSV download and you will get a spreadsheet showing all the metrics for your pages including bounce rate, time on-site and traffic for each page.

Next you need to set your CMS to autmatically add the noindex tag or temporarily delete (and redirect to category level) the worst performing pages on your site, 10% at a time, until the traffic picks up or you realise that you have too much low quality content and have to think of another plan. Don’t delete pages that are still getting lots of search traffic, just get rid of pages with high bounce rate, low time on site and very little search traffic, or a big drop in search traffic recently.