tedster - 2:47 am on Apr 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

I never saw that advice, was it from Google official?

JohnMu < correction, this quote is from Wysz > gave this advice in the monster thread on the Google Webmaster Forums:

...if you believe you've been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.

The part about finding the pages that were dropped the most is my added interpretation of HOW to spot the pages that Google considers low quality.

Your example and the above statement contradict each other.

The one site that seems to have recovered involved lots of repair work to the content, including removing a lot of URLs and improving others. I should not have used the word "page" because it is not a technically precise word - it can mean either "content" or "URL".

So what I'm trying to say about Panda not being a true penalty is this - the same URL certainly may rank well again, but not if content that was previously rated as low quality hasn't changed. With penalties, the same URL can sometimes rank after a period in the penalty box, even if no changes are made to the content.

[edited by: tedster at 3:20 am (utc) on Apr 7, 2011]