ACFinLA - 1:28 am on Oct 1, 2011 (gmt 0)

One of the sites I manage was hit in the February Panda update (50%+ drop in traffic). We recovered in July (100%+ recovery). On Sept. 28 our traffic dropped again (40% drop so far). The site has about 100K pages.

Some of the changes we made between Feb-July were...
*removed over 12K user profile and comment pages that had very little content on them.

*major cleanup on heading tags that were misused to format text rather than to provide page structure info

*removed standard manufacturer product descriptions from over 45K product pages. this content was also being used by other sites on the web.

*no-indexed over 7K pages that had text excerpts from articles published by blogs in our partner network as well as links to their articles

*no-followed links that we had pointing back to our content partners. these links were persistent across most pages on our site

*made some modifications to a section of pages that had low engagement metrics (high bounce rate and low pages per vist/time on site). we added links to related content on the site, to initiate more page view activity. that increased PPV by 20% or more for those pages

We didn't do much other than that. I believe we may have been incorrectly hit in the first Panda update and just recovered in July when Google said that update was made to help sites that were incorrectly hit. However, that theory is invalidated today, unless Google mistakenly reverted back to some Panda factors that were in place before July.