I am about to commit a major faux pas by quoting a large block of content from a recent post by Lisa Barone from OutspokenMedia but I feel that if I simply post a link, many will miss what I consider to be a great bit of content in a fairly long post. For those who aren't aware, there is a search marketing expo going on (smxwest) and she just happens to be reporting on the going ons there (I think she is reporting for Jerry West's group as well. Lisa has done a very good job reporting up to this point. The quoted text below (along with some other cool notations) can be found on her most recent post, Content Farms or the Smartest SEO's in the World.

At any rate, one of the speakers, Byrne Hobert from BlueFountainMedia, gave a presentation on the latest Panda Update by Google (aka, Farmer's update). While I am sure that the presentation was probably much better than the cliff's notes, Lisa's summary is good enough to see how we got to where we are, how the correction could have affected these sites, and the template that us internet marketers should use if we intend to evolve with the changes.

While these aren't necessarily the "word", it does give light to something I have kind of suspected that this update affected- Domain trust - because the sites themselves weren't deindexed, they were devalued.

Another thing that I mentioned to my facebook friends was that IF Google doesn't devalue eHow, then they are perhaps the best template to follow for writing and marketing content.

How we got here: Domain Authority

• Ability to rank thousands of pages by domain trust/time
• Longtail rankings add up to a critical mass of traffic
• Demand Media, Associated Content, get their start.

At the New York Times, they created Topic pages for popular things that they wrote about. Some of them were really great, while others kind of sucked. But even so, they'd rank really well because of domain authority. That's what Google was correcting for.

Farmer: A site-wide filter on domain authority.

Farmer Factor applied to the site's normal ranking ability

If you have enough of this "farmer smell" on your site, it can pull you down site-wide on stronger terms if you're that bad.

Possible Panda Signals

• Quality vs Quantity ratio
• Big sites relying on domain authority
• Small sites with few quality pages
• Sites with an overload of ads/links

What's a common factor of survivors?

• Good brand signals, enough juice to escape the 'farmer smell'.
• That Elusive Brand Smell
• Google News exclusion
• Tweets/Shares/Links
• Balanced ration of deep links vs index page links

How do I get out of this/or avoid getting into it

You're probably not getting out of this by whining to Google. You got caught in the algorithmic filter. It's time to cowboy up and figure out how you got in here.

• Follow eHow's template. No ads above the fold, good content
• Clean up your site.
• Build out brand signals
• Channels/domain
• Tighten editorial controls
• Scale promotion