When the time comes to write my professional memoirs, the first chapter will be called “My Formal Career Started With a Panda.” On February 23, 2011, Google rolled out its Panda algorithm update, which targeted low-quality websites. As a result, I got my first full-time job as an SEO associate working on a platform negatively impacted by Panda.
In the lead-up to this, content farms had popped up trying to rank #1 for any keyword you can think of. If you Google “How to Boil Water,” there are dozens of articles explaining how to do it. Demand Media was one of the most notorious, publishing hundreds of thousands of articles every month.