Duncan Morris from Distilled gave this valuable presentation that can be found at http://www.distilled.net/store/boston2011-panda/. You can get the video of the talk for free by signing up for Distilled’s free monthly videos here and you will receive a code to get the video for free or you can buy the video from their store (individual videos typically cost about $70-90).
Key takeaways from the talk:
-Blekko banned 20 content farms but there are some search results that are better due to content farms.
-Make your content valuable to people.
-Don’t have advertising as more than 50% of your page.
-A common denominator of sites hit by Panda was poor design.
-Having a Wikipedia page is a good signal that your site is trustworthy.
-Spammy sites don’t typically have Twitter followers and use Rel=Author.
-Don’t buy Twitter followers.
-Remove low value content from your site.
-Noindex your worst quality user generated content.
-Long load time increases bounce rate.
-Google is more concerned with getting rid of bad content.
-Great content will be shared online. That is how Google could tell that it is great.
You can visit the Distilled SEO Blog for more great SEO tips and advice. They also have a new premium SEO training course called DistilledU.