By now most of you have heard rumblings about Google's Panda update (also sometimes referred to as the Farmer Update) either because your site has been affected by it, or because you know of websites that have suffered catastrophic losses in organic search rankings as a result of the update. Google updated Panda most recently in late June, so now is the perfect time to run through the update and give everyone some tips.

If you aren't sure exactly what Panda is, here is a brief explanation: Google's Panda update is basically a revision to the Google algorithm that penalizes low quality content by lowering organic search rankings for pages it considers to be of poor quality. Panda takes into account usage metrics as opposed to only factoring traditional ranking factors such as inbound link count and keyword usage.

With Panda, usage statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, and average pageviews are factored into the algorithm, as well as social signal