What is Googles Farmer Update

The Farmer update, or Panda update was one of a few hundred algorithm changes Google makes to its search each year. The Farmer update got its name because the change was aimed at removing content farms from the search results.
A content farm is a web site set up just to trap key-word searches, but really has little or no content. Maybe hundreds or thousands of articles designed to bring in search traffic. However the articles are usually poorly written and are just filled with key words to attract traffic.

The Farmer algorithm update went live in the US on February 24th, with an update to non-US searches some time later but has yet to be announced. So if you have a site in the US and saw a decline in search traffic from Google starting on or after the 24 of last month you could be effected by the Farmer update.

One of the few comments Google has made regarding the update is that a weak page on your site could effect the entire site [which is some what new]. In the past it seemed that a weak page with little or no content would just never be indexed by Google, but never seemed to draw down other pages in the web site. Any way the forums are full of people giving advice, but the poster are just guesses.

So any way I wanted to detail a few changes that I made to the web site, not that I know I've been effected.
1. Deleted a dozen orphan pages from the server. The orphan pages had been out there for years and were mis-spelled page addresses or abandon pages that were no longer used. At one point they had news groups or what ever linking to them, so I saw no reason to show a 404 page not found. But after a few years, I'm sure that no one is reading those old news group posts and clicking in.
2. Redirected another dozen pages to something else. These page were being used, but had more weight years ago. As time has past they slowly lost content due to links going bad, or no interest from me in trying to fix them; however 10 years ago they were valid pages.
3. I removed about a dozen pages relating to advice on using Adsense, as their page views had been falling over the last few years and they did not have any relation to an engineering topic.
4. I removed a few ads on some of the pages, only because the content had decreased over time, because links on the pages were no longer working. Removing an ad was part of a normal page review and had nothing to do with the algo update. How ever some people in the forums are saying to many ads could effect a pages ranking, and pages with ads above the fold ~ I think that's garbage.
5. I fixed a number of bad links on the site, but I do that all the time. Out-going links are always going bad
6. I removed dozens of blog posting from early years on this blog. I've also done this from time to time in the past. Some times I'll write a blog post to keep the blog going, but in the big picture the post is of no interest to any one but the few people following the blog. But if Google is going to rank the entire blog based on these thin posts, then it's better just to remove them. This blog had 534 posts in Dec, but now has 512.
7. I've been optimizing HTML code on the site to reduce loading time, but I've been doing that for a year now.
8. Removing pic files from Google Picasa and storing them on the server, which should help with page loading and I've also been doing that for a year now.
9. I removed the Google tool bar because it seemed it was tracking me more than the site visitors. The tool bar measures page loading time and was showing wide variations when the load times should have been more even. I figured the tool bar was tracking 'my' page loads bringing up slower pages looking to optimize. In other words I would open a 'slow' page to fix, but showing Google a slow page. So Google was seeing more slow pages because of my tool bar usage than it normally would.
10. Updating pages with the new faster Google Analytics tracking code. I was doing that any way, and again to decrease page loading time.
11. Updating or enhancing page content ~ I do that any way.
12. Deleted or removed dozens of out going links, that were valid but seemed to be outdated ~ maybe they had a copy right of 2004 on their page. Normally the page had to many links any way, so no harm done.
13. I added a few more no-follow tags to some out going links, again their pages seems outdated.

I've been making these changes either before or after the 24th of last month and I've seen no difference in page views. However any decrease in page views that has occurred has really only occurred to a few high page-view pages, other pages are up or down as normal.

Comparing Feb to March the site is down 10%
Comparing Jan to March the site is down 0%
However March is normally higher than either of the previous months.

At the same time it could be that my site was not hit by the Algo change, rather some other sites are just doing better in the SERPS now ~ there's no way to tell. In any event these changes are normal Search Engine Optimization or SEO type changes.