Smacked by Google's Content Farmer Update? Here's what to do

• Help! My site was recently hit by the Google Content Farmer update and I'm DEFINITELY not a content farm. My rankings have dropped and my traffic is down 50%. What can I do to get Google to reverse this recent Smackdown?

Answer: As we covered in our March Google Search Engine Strategies Updates, the Content Farmer update (known internally by Google as Panda), affected a pretty significant 12% of all search queries.

Unfortunately, as you have discovered the hard way, with an update this large there was bound to be high-quality content-intensive sites that were unfairly targeted by the algorithmic shift.

Forums exploded all over the Internet listing example after example after example of sites who felt they were unfairly grouped in with the recent update. Many sites reported they lost 50% or more of their US-based search traffic even though they were serving 100% unique content and had been for years.

The problem was that even though these sites claimed their content was unique, many of the examples reported showed this was not the case. These issues were many and included, among others:

• The failure or the incorrect use of the canonical tag, especially with shopping-enabled sites (resulting in duplicate URLS being indexed by Google)...